So... a lot of talk today about what's on the record, and what's off the record. It should be a delicate balance. My own interesting experience with this happened in 2011. I got a 15-minute interview with Adrian Peterson during the lockout, and it didn't take long for him to go off on the situation. At one point, Peterson said that the NFL owners were subjecting players to "modern-day slavery." You may remember that particular headline. I immediately stopped the interview and asked Peterson if he realized what he just said, and what the damage could be. I said that if he wanted to roll back time about 20 seconds and make that off the record, I would respect that. He said... actually insisted... that it was on the record. Then, he repeated it at maximum volume to remove any doubt. Editorial where I worked at the time wasn't really equipped to deal with it, and I was a noob. Didn't know what to do. I wrote it up and published it. Peterson's agent contacted me and said that I would never have access to any of his clients ever again. He then implied that I made the whole thing up. I responded that I had the entire interview on a digital recording, and I'd be happy to e-mail it to him. I was not engaging in gotcha journalism. I had Peterson's explicit permission (encouragement) to put it out there. I sent the full audio, and never heard another word about it. The point is, I believe we who capture the thoughts of prominent people have an obligation to at least make sure that confidential thoughts are kept as such. Sometimes, we speak off the cuff with emotion and say things we don't mean to say, and we don't always understand the process of making sure some things aren't placed in the public domain. This is not to say that we are responsible for sanitizing anything for anybody. But we are responsible to ensure that the stories we get are gotten fairly. Re: what happened to Mike Macdonald, I don't believe that his interviewer got a story worth violating that implied trust. Because there is no story worth violating that trust.