Salon Decries Ambush Video Journalism – Except When Their Reporter Does It

Gabriel Winant at Salon.com has a high-minded and sober criticism of Bill O’Reilly’s “Ambush Video” of Al Gore. Winant decries this kind of “gotcha” journalism as mis-leading and exploitative:

O’Reilly, as Salon has pointed out before, is fond of the ambush interview. It’s an unfair gimmick to begin with, and the O’Reilly Factor has always relied on that inherent unbalanced quality to produce some incredibly misleading and exploitative footage. Yesterday, the Factor showed footage of its ambush specialist, the impossibly smug producer Jesse Watters, badgering Al Gore before a lecture at Duke University.

Nice to see Salon.com take a such a stalwart stance on this kind of thing. To think, a punk kid with a camera tracking down and following a public figure to try to get them to say something damaging on video. Oh wait, isn’t that exactly what Editor-in-chief Joan Walsh of Salon.com gleefully celebrated in February after her reporter, Mike Madden, used the same tactic on Big Journalism publisher Andrew Breitbart? The title of her article: “Breitbart’s Breakdown: a Video Tour.”

Mr. Winant should probably run these things by Ms. Walsh before posting them, otherwise Salon.com might appear to have a double-standard when it comes to this sort of thing.

I wonder what Ms. Walsh thinks about Mr. Winant’s take. Is the ambush video of Mr. Gore not up to Salon.com’s high journalistic standards because Gore didn’t engage and provide a sound byte like Breitbart did? Would they have reprimanded their own reporter, Mr. Madden, if Breitbart had merely repeated “I’m not doing an interview” over and over again like Gore did?

Instead, Breitbart engaged Madden and answered his questions. And Salon.com dutifully ran the videos and enjoyed their page views. Walsh even compiled the videos into her own column where she refers to Madden’s ambush video as deserving of “hazard pay.” She also nearly does an end-zone dance when describing the paydirt she struck by capturing Breitbart’s anger on video: “Madden got the Drudge/HuffPo factotum turned Big Journalism impresario to lose his stuff twice on Saturday…”

Interesting turn of phrase that. Walsh doesn’t say Madden “captured Breitbart losing his stuff on video,” does she? No, she attributes the cause of Breitbart’s anger directly to her reporter, Mike Madden. Isn’t this exactly the kind of disingenuous, ambush journalism that Mr. Winant is looking down his nose at in today’s article?

Mainly, it’s a master class in smarminess. The whole thing is staged so that Watters is shouting embarrassing-seeming questions at a fleeing Gore, who will obviously not engage with them.

So which is it Salon.com?

Is this sort of thing bad when other news outlets do it, but it’s worthy of hazard pay when your reporters do it?

Or —

Is it despicable when the target is from the left and he dodges questions and refuses to be held accountable, but it’s worthy of praise when the target is a conservative rival who actually engages the reporter and doesn’t hide?

Of course, if Salon.com hadn’t sent Madden with a flip camera to stalk Breitbart around the lobby then they wouldn’t have all those cool, menacing and distorted screen-caps that they continue to use whenever they write about Breitbart… even today.