Barack Obama’s recent comments about some small-towners being “bitter” were delivered at a fundraiser where journalists weren’t allowed. Samantha Power’s gaffe, calling Hillary Clinton a “monster,” was declared “off the record,” moments after it was said, albeit politically posthumously. Both of these moments quickly made their way to the web and went viral. That’s because in today’s journalism, “there is no such thing as ‘off the record’ anymore,” Robert Niles writes for the Online Journalism Review. With cell phone cameras in every pocket, life is more like “a small frontier town, where everyone knows everyone else’s business.” So be careful what you say, on or off the record.
