Thanks to Civil Beat’s Chad Blair for taking a closer look at the gifts of food and drink provided to reporters and editors by former UH athletic director Jim Donovan and paid for out of a discretionary account he controlled (“Dinner And Drinks? It’s On Jim Donovan!“).
I’m not quite sure what to think about such practices.
These didn’t seem to be everyday affairs. The relatively small number of occurances were spread out over several years, and in most cases the values were relatively small. In some cases the sketchy descriptions imply the reporters might have been part of a larger group.
Blair quotes Star-Advertiser editor Frank Bridgewater:
“I also think we expect reporters to have sources, to work with them and get beyond the news conference and the press release,” he said. “I was reviewing the New York Times policy over the last few days, and having sources is an essential skill. That comes outside of normal business hours and seeing them for drinks and dinner — as long as you make clear it’s business versus social. And you have to trust reporters to keep an arm’s-length distance.”
So I turned directly to the NY Times ethics code. Here’s the section Bridgewater seems to refer to.
24. Relationships with sources require sound judgment and self-awareness to prevent the fact or appearance of partiality. Cultivating sources is an essential skill, often practiced most effectively in informal settings outside of normal business hours. Yet staff members, especially those assigned to beats, must be aware that personal relationships with news sources can erode into favoritism, in fact or appearance. Editors, who normally have a wide range of relationships, must be especially wary of showing partiality. Where friends and neighbors are also newsmakers, journalists must guard against giving them extra access or a more sympathetic ear. When practical, the best solution is to have someone else deal with them.
25. Though this topic defies firm rules, it is essential that we preserve professional detachment, free of any hint of bias. Staff members may see sources informally over a meal or drinks, but they must keep in mind the difference between legitimate business and personal friendship. A city editor who enjoys a weekly round of golf with a city council member, for example, risks creating an appearance of coziness. So does a television news producer who spends weekends in the company of people we cover. Scrupulous practice requires that periodically we step back and look at whether we have drifted too close to sources with whom we deal regularly. The test of freedom from favoritism is the ability to maintain good working relationships with all parties to a dispute.
Hmmmm. I also noted this item applying specifically to reporters covering sports.
59. Except for properly issued press passes for event coverage, members of the sports staff may not accept tickets, travel expenses, meals, gifts or any other benefit from teams or promoters. (At their discretion, unit newsroom managements may permit journalists to accept the light refreshments routinely offered in press boxes during games.)
Would that apply to collegiate sports as well? Don’t know.
There’s also a separate provision under the heading, “Protecting our neutrality.”
35. Staff members and those on assignment for us may not accept anything that could be construed as a payment for favorable coverage or for avoiding unfavorable coverage. They may not accept gifts, tickets, discounts, reimbursements or other benefits from individuals or organizations covered (or likely to be covered) by their newsroom. Gifts should be returned with a polite explanation; perishable gifts may instead be given to charity, also with a note to the donor. In either case the objective of the note is, in all politeness, to discourage future gifts.
Here’s an excerpt from the Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics:
—Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.
— Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.
— Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and shun secondary employment, political involvement, public office and service in community organizations if they compromise journalistic integrity.
— Disclose unavoidable conflicts.
I’m not sure where all this leads.
I do like the test suggested by the NYT: “The test of freedom from favoritism is the ability to maintain good working relationships with all parties to a dispute.”
Something to think about.
Discover more from i L i n d
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Bad approaches to news ethics?
The FOX approach: Pretending you are not biased,
then practically spitting at the camera when the facts contradict your reports. And the FOX viewer approach: insisting the news media is evil and corrupt and unfair when something happens that proves you wrong.
And the unrealistic approach: pretending that people who live on an island can maintain complete and total independence from everyone else. we may as well believe Hawaii has the strongest economy in the world and the best education system in the galaxy.
I read the Star-Advertiser report the other day, and the editor made some lame statement about how the sports reporters are expected to reciprocate in the future (like that makes it OK). But the report somehow failed to mention the $836 dinner and $136 bottle of Dom Perignon the publisher received from Donovan. Oh, just an oversight I suppose.
While it may seem troubling to see the publisher of the newspaper being wined and dined as such, it is common practice in the news industry. The people who head news organizations are not overseers of journalism. They are business administrators. Salespeople. They donate money. They receive gifts.
Publishers and station general managers are not beholden to the same code of ethics as the actual journalists. It would’ve been far more troubling if the executive editor received a bottle of Dom P.
Nah, the EE probably got the bottle of Cristal! You’re right about newspapers being run by businessmen. Maybe that’s the problem. There are or have been publishers who came up through the ranks of journalism.
One common characteristic of any “profession” is a requirement to maintain a separation between professional and personal relationships.
Sometimes this means that a choice must be made even to terminate a pre-existing personal relationship if one wishes to pursue the profession.
Codes of ethics or company rules help codify this, and of course, they are necessary because some people are reluctant to maintain the degree of separation that is appropriate.
Where would psychology be as a profession if psychologists dated their patients? Where would journalism be if reporters or editors allowed themselves to be bribed with meals or gifts? Where would priests be if… ok, let’s not go there.
These comments will probably label me as totally cyclical but OK, guilty your honor. The reporting in this town has gotten so bad that a reporter accepting dinner or whatever to get a good story may be an improvement. It seems that a lot of what passes for reporting is just regurgitation of press releases, summarization of what is heard on the police scanner or calling around to the usual suspects for comment.
Cyclical??? That is bizarre. I blame it on the spell checker. It should be cynical of course.
Right on.
“The lowest form of popular culture – lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives – has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.”
Carl Bernstein
As a long-term sports fan both collegiately and professionally, I’ve gotten to know a number of sports reporters in both the print and electronic media. The ones I know do NOT get bought with a freebie dinner.
Just read the Sundays stories b7 five different local sportswriters – none of them is kissing aXX to cover the coaching mistakes because someone bought them a beer and nachos.
The food and drinks are paid out of what is essentially a slush fund (from donations) with the explicit caveat that the those funds only be used to influence VIPs in the local community to benefit the Athletics department.
So if the food and drink (which are more elaborate, it seems, than mere “beer and nachos”) are NOT influencing reporters, which is your claim, then the donors’ money should NOT be spent.
Donovan should have spent his own money on treating his guests, or not treated them at all, in that case.
Regarding the $140 bottle of champagne that Star-Advertiser publisher Dennis Francis accepted, and which Craig noted above:
When I was at the Star-Bulletin, editor Frank Bridgewater regularly sent reminder emails to newsroom staff forbidding us to accept gifts greater than $20 in value.
The rules apparently didn’t (don’t) apply to management. And here’s the best part: While we’re tsk-tsking at Francis taking a bottle of Dom, he’s probably snickering about all the other gifts he’s received hat nobody will ever find out about. A $140 bottle of wine is small potatoes to that guy.
The rules didn’t apply to the Features section, either, where staffers and editors regularly carted out bags full of food, clothing items, jewelry, booze, and other gifts from the subjects of their stories. (Food and clothing — hey, just like the “Ladies’ Sections” of the 1950s! Great.)
Do you think the guy who’s covering the club scene pays for his drinks all night? And how does the Sluttie of the Week earn her spot on the front page of staradvertiser.com? How is that person selected? It’s embarrassing that they even have such a feature at all, let alone on the main page.
Sports, Business, Editorial … they don’t regularly write about expensive consumer items. No free stuff for them! And forget the copy desk, the Web staff, and the clerks.
Yeah, I’m a dinosaur. And the publisher of the Star-Advertiser can buy his own damn wine.
Hey! Hey! Hey! That sluttie of the week section is my favorite party of the Star Ad.
Sorry Nancy. Nancysaurus is already taken.
https://twitter.com/Nancysaurus
In my 46 years collecting news, including lots of sports, I never found a burger and beer worth worrying about. But Dom Perignon is quite a different matter — a page out of the Lindy Lingle playbook.
The true issue is are the sports writers and columnists covering the stories with an even hand? I think when it comes to Norm Chow football they are not. And I doubt he is providing any booze anywhere.
Please distinguish between the business side of the newspaper (The Star Advertiser sponsored the game last weekend because they apparently think that will help their bottom line) and the editorial side of the newspaper (the people who write and edit the news).
If Jim Donovan wined and dined the publisher, and the publisher donated thousands toward the bottom line of the Athletics Department, then Donovan was doing his job. And it is not unethical for the publisher to accept the gifts as appreciation for the larger donation that he or she is making.
There is a widespread perception within the local readership (voiced in this blog’s comment section and elsewhere) that the firewalls between the advertising, editorial and journalistic functions traditionally maintained in proper newspapers do not really exist for the Star Advertiser.
Yes, you can count on zero hands the number of times the Star-Bulletin and Star-Advertiser have written something negative or critical about Longs Drugs since David Black became commander-in-chief more than 10 years ago.
What if Longs or its employees were committing fraud in Hawaii? How long would they get away with it and how many innocent people in Hawaii would suffer? If we are expected to pay for quality journalism in Hawaii, we expect actual quality.