Syndicate Reacts to Leak of George Will's 'Miers' Column to a Blog

By: Dave Astor A George Will column leaked to a blogger has caused the Washington Post Writers Group to rethink the advisory it includes with content it syndicates.

WPWG sent the column -- which sharply criticized President Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court -- to Will's 450-plus clients on Tuesday. The advisory said the column was "for immediate release," which has traditionally meant "for immediate release" in the next print edition -- in this case, Wednesday's paper.

But the column was posted late Tuesday afternoon on the ConfirmThem.com blog under the words: "I don't know if this is an advance copy of George Will's next column (I can?t find it online right now), but it was sent to me by someone who works for a major newspaper and I wanted to share it with y'all right away." Then the column started appearing all over the Web, and has been widely quoted since.

"There was nothing we could do [to halt the online spread] that night," said Alan Shearer, editorial director and general manager of WPWG.

But Shearer was determined to do something the next day. He sent a Wednesday e-mail to all of Will's clients reminding them not to break a column's embargo date and not to send a column to another media outlet, such as a blog.

Even though he hadn't contacted ConfirmThem.com, Shearer said he soon received an e-mail from that blog offering an apology and saying it hadn't realized it was doing something wrong. But when Shearer asked which "major newspaper" leaked the column, the blog wouldn't name it.

Shearer -- realizing the potentially confusing nature of the "immediate release" advisory, which dates back to the pre-Web days of the 1970s -- sent a second Wednesday e-mail to Will's clients saying WPWG was thinking of a way to re-word the advisory. Shearer doesn't yet know what the new advisory will be, but said it will be changed soon.

Whatever the confusion about "immediate release," said Shearer, "we never gave permission to send a column to another publication -- and we consider a blog another publication."

Shearer also wouldn't want clients to put a Will column on their online editions before it runs in their print editions. "You want the impact to be in your newspaper," he said.

In the column -- headlined "Can This Nomination Be Justified?" -- Will wrote that it's "not important that [Miers] be confirmed because there is no evidence that she is among the leading lights of American jurisprudence, or that she possesses talents commensurate with the Supreme Court's tasks. The president's 'argument' for her amounts to: Trust me. There is no reason to...."

The conservative commentator added that Bush has "neither the inclination nor the ability to make sophisticated judgments about competing approaches to construing the Constitution" and "the president has forfeited his right to be trusted as a custodian of the Constitution." The column ended with this question: "For this we need a conservative president?" -- with the word conservative in italics.

Shearer said by the time he read that last line, "I knew the column would have an impact." The WPWG executive told E&P Online he saw at least 300 Wednesday e-mails reacting to Will's column from conservatives, liberals, and people who didn't identify their political affiliation. "People were agreeing with the column 50 to 1," said Shearer.

He added that, periodically, "George Will comes up with surprising positions...and crystallizes conservative thinking" in his column. The Miers piece, said Shearer, was an example of that -- as was a February 1974 column Will wrote saying conservatives should consider the possibility of President Nixon being removed from office.