When is “off the record” actually off the record? Dana Goldstein says “shame on The Scotsman” for publishing Samantha Power’s description of Hillary Clinton as “a monster”. But this is not a matter of shame, nor necessarily, as Goldstein suggests, of the foreign press “stooping to play gotcha with secondary advisors”.
It may well be that Power’s comments came at the end of an interview which mainly focused on her new book. I don’t know. But I do know that you don’t really get to take a mulligan when you make a blunder in an interview. If power had prefaced her characterisation of Hillary as a monster with the phrase, “Now, what I’m about to say is off the record…” then that would be one thing and it would be a breach of trust or etiquette for the paper* to print her comments.
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