When I came to the Tribune in 1990, the newspaper was moving toward adopting its first written code of ethics for editorial department employees.
On the day when a draft of the code was presented at a meeting of newsroom managers, I recall how indignant I felt at the provision that forbade top-ranking editors “to sit on policymaking bodies of outside institutions.” How obtuse, I thought–and I was one of two or three who expressed these thoughts–that we should be sealing ourselves off from participation in the very communities we live in and write about. Just what we needed: one more thing to make us seem like monks and nuns, cloistered in a stone tower and out of touch with the people.
My arguments didn’t carry the day back then, and it’s probably best that they didn’t. I hadn’t experienced then what I have experienced almost every working day for the last 15 years, first as editorial page editor and now as public editor: the profound cynicism of a large segment of newspaper readers about what appears in the pages of our publications.
No suspicion is too dark or absurd to win a following. No conflict of interest is too insignificant to engender doubts.
So if one of us must forgo membership on the regional Boy Scout council so that our stories about jail abuse can enjoy more credibility, then I guess that’s the way it has to be. If someone must decline membership on her college board of trustees so our college sports coverage may not be considered biased, so be it. As my colleague Steve Chapman is wont to say: Nobody drafted us into this business.
Still, I wonder about some of the tradeoffs that we have made, some of the bits and pieces of our citizenship and community membership that we give up so that we may practice more effectively our chosen roles as members of the press. A couple of recent examples illustrate.
- On Saturday, Sept. 10, this item ran in the “Corrections and Clarifications” column on Page 2: “A story in Friday’s Tempo section about Oprah Winfrey’s visit to hurricane-stricken New Orleans contained comparisons of Winfrey to President Bush that were unfavorable to Bush. The Tribune failed to disclose that the writer was a contributor to the presidential campaign last year of Bush’s opponent, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.). Tribune standards require disclosure of any such conflict of interest.”
That writer, Maureen Ryan, had come to me early in 2004 and asked whether she was permitted to make such donations. Our policy then was that no reporter or editor involved in political coverage could make political donations, but those “with no connection to political coverage” could.
Ryan was a features writer at the time, completely uninvolved in political coverage. She clearly was allowed to donate and I told her so. Her supervisors were informed so they could make sure she didn’t inadvertently stray into writing about politics.
A year and a half later, however, Ryan’s assignment had changed: She was writing about TV. And her supervisors had many other writers and other issues on their minds. So when she sent in a piece of copy about Oprah with a note asking whether her mention of Bush was “too political,” it went right past the editor’s radar.
I’m not the one with the last word on this, but I’ll bet that when our revised Code of Editorial Principles is promulgated in a few weeks, it will include a flat ban on political donations by editorial staffers. Policing exceptions is simply a nightmare. Maybe just as important, the notion that any topic a reporter writes on nowadays can remain sequestered from politics and partisanship is simply an illusion.
- When the subject is fundraising, we already operate under a virtual flat ban–one that I’m not sure is wise. Our policy points out that fundraising efforts by staff members have “the potential to create a conflict of interest or the appearance of one.”
It then decrees: “The rule of thumb is that no staff members should engage in or lend their names to fundraising efforts, even if their Tribune connection is not explicitly mentioned.”
For staffers who would just as soon not be bothered with appeals to participate in such activities, this is a convenient escape hatch.
But what if you’re the high-profile columnist who is asked to play a tune or be on a celebrity basketball team at a fundraiser for an eminently worthy community institution–and you genuinely want to do it?
Many’s the time that I’ve had people give me a “That’s screwy” look when I told them I was forbidden by company policy to participate in one of these activities. And I’ve decided that they’re probably right: It very often is screwy.
The problem, as always, is where short of a flat ban to draw the line, and how to make it hold. I’m not sure I have those answers–yet.
