The scholarly literature on leaking rests on a civic premise. The leaker, in this account, weighs the public interest against institutional loyalty and personal risk, and when conscience outweighs career, he goes to the press. The premise survives because it flatters everyone in the transaction. The source becomes a man of principle. The journalist becomes the instrument of accountability. The news organization becomes the civic infrastructure both require. Practitioners know a humbler truth, and they confine it to memoirs, eulogies, and barroom instruction. Most leaks flow to reporters whom sources enjoy. The proposition sounds trivial. It explains more of the historical record than the civic premise does, and it deserves the analytic treatment it rarely receives.
Begin with what a leak costs the source. He risks his job, his clearance, his standing with colleagues, and in some jurisdictions his liberty. Against these costs the civic model offers conscience, and the strategic model offers factional advantage. Both payoffs are real and both are insufficient, because they fail to explain the observed pattern of distribution. Conscience and strategy might predict that leaks flow to the reporter with the largest audience or the sharpest pen. They flow instead to particular individuals, in quantities that beggar their institutional rank, and they keep flowing to those individuals across decades, beats, and administrations. The variable that explains the distribution lives in the texture of the conversation.
The word fun misleads if taken to mean wit. The quality decomposes into at least five components, and few of its great practitioners possess all of them.
The first component is risk discount. A source prices the gamble of disclosure in the moment of speech, and he prices it from tone. A relaxed, unhurried, amused interlocutor signals that nothing catastrophic happens in this room. A tense and transactional one signals danger even when he intends none. The inference has no logical force. A reporter’s charm tells the source nothing about how the reporter handles attribution under deadline pressure. Sources make the inference anyway, because human beings read discretion from demeanor, and the reporter who grasps this conducts himself like a man with nowhere else to be. Robert Novak (1931-2009) built a half-century franchise on the discount. His column drew blood weekly, yet Republican staffers fed him without pause because an hour with Novak felt like membership in something rather than exposure to something.
The second component is exchange. Political and bureaucratic elites trade gossip the way merchants trade grain, and a reporter who arrives with empty hands asks for charity. The reporter who knows things, and who spends the harmless fraction of what he knows, converts the interview into commerce. Tim Russert (1950-2008) ran this trade from Capitol Hill staff jobs into broadcasting. Mike Allen (b. 1964) industrialized it. His Playbook digest dispensed hundreds of small items each morning, every item a micro-leak, and every flattered subject of an item became a candidate supplier of the next one. The pleasure of the exchange model lies in the game. The source enjoys the trade as a card player enjoys the table, and the reporter who plays well gets invited back.
The third component is confession. High office isolates. The men who hold it speak all day through masks, to audiences they must manage, in language vetted for consequence. A reporter who listens without visible judgment offers the rarest commodity in their lives, which is an intelligent audience before whom the mask can drop. Bob Woodward (b. 1943) stands as the supreme demonstration, and he refutes the assumption that the trait requires charm. Few who know Woodward describe him as a sparkling companion. He offers something better. He treats the source’s account as material for history, he sits still for four hours, and he lets a man explain himself without interruption. For an official of a certain temperament, dictating one’s memoirs to posterity while still in office beats any amount of wit. Seymour Hersh (b. 1937) sells the opposite pleasure with the same result. A conversation with Hersh feels like induction into a conspiracy against the official version of events. Woodward’s source leaves feeling historical. Hersh’s source leaves feeling subversive. Both leave feeling that the hour was the most consequential of their week, and both call again.
The fourth component is the mirror. Powerful men attract supplicants and adversaries, and almost no one in their orbit attends to them without wanting something immediate. The skilled reporter supplies focused, informed, sustained attention, and he asks the questions the source’s vanity has waited years to hear. How did you pull that off. What did the president say then. The questions confirm the source’s centrality to the narrative, and the source returns to the reporter as a man returns to the one portraitist who paints him at his best. Ben Bradlee (1921-2014) worked the mirror from the editor’s chair. Officials sought his company because his attention conferred a kind of election, and the Georgetown of his era institutionalized the effect. James Reston (1909-1995) received policy at lunch. Joseph Alsop (1910-1989) ran a dinner table at which the price of the terrapin was candor, and half of Cold War Washington paid it. The salon has since died of polarization and the open-plan office, but its logic survives wherever a reporter makes a source feel chosen.
The fifth component is dialect. Elite worlds run on dense local knowledge, on who hates whom and who owes whom and which rivalry explains which decision, and a source finds it exhausting to tutor an outsider in the geography before reaching the point. The reporter who speaks the dialect lowers the cost of the conversation to zero. Maggie Haberman (b. 1973) commands the Trump-world dialect so completely that figures in that orbit appear to call her under compulsion, less to spin her than to consult the one scorekeeper they trust to know their current standing. Jonathan Swan (b. 1985) holds a similar franchise in congressional and executive maneuvering, and his sources describe a man who relishes the material for its own sake. The relish does the work. A source can tell within ninety seconds whether his world bores the man across the table, and boredom kills more sourcing relationships than betrayal does.
The Australian record confirms the pattern at a useful distance from American mythology. Paul Kelly (b. 1947) drew decades of high-level disclosure from ministers and mandarins who found that an hour with Kelly clarified their own thinking, the interview functioning for them as a tutorial they happened to teach. Laurie Oakes (b. 1943) took leaks from every faction of both major parties for forty years, and the breadth of his supply reveals the trait’s final and least discussed component. Each of Oakes’s leakers believed, with some justice, that Oakes understood him. The best practitioners sustain that belief in enemies at the same time. The conversational ease that opens one minister’s door opens his rival’s door the same afternoon, and the great leak magnets manage the polygamy without any spouse feeling betrayed.
The trait carries costs, and the costs define the limits of the model. A reporter whom everyone enjoys becomes dependent on remaining enjoyable, and the dependence bends coverage. The access journalist protects the relationship at the reader’s expense, sands the edges off what he knows, banks the best material for a book. Michael Wolff (b. 1953) displays a second failure mode. His conversations run so loose and so warm that sources later claim, sometimes with cause, that they never understood the terms of the exchange. The counter-tradition answers both corruptions. I. F. Stone (1907-1989) held that sources flatter and documents do not, and he produced a body of work of permanent value while receiving almost no leaks at all. Mike Wallace (1918-2012) extracted disclosure through confrontation, and the investigative tradition that runs through reporters like Australia’s Chris Masters (b. 1948) rests on evidence and stamina rather than on company anyone seeks. Journalism requires both kinds. The leak magnet rarely concedes how much of his magnetism the reader subsidizes.
The professional mythology of journalism describes a discipline of method, in which information surrenders to persistence and verification. The mythology is half true and the suppressed half is social. The leak is a relationship before it is a transaction, and the relationship begins where all relationships begin, in the discovery that the other person’s company rewards the time. Sources are men who spend their days in guarded speech among people who want things from them. The reporter who offers risk-discounted, well-informed, attentive, and pleasurable conversation has built a channel that no encryption protocol and no compliance regime can fully close, because the channel runs on appetite. Editors can teach method. They cannot teach a man to be the phone call a deputy secretary looks forward to returning. The ones who are collect the secrets, and the profession, which prefers to honor its detectives, owes a more candid accounting to its hosts.
