Can journalists be joiners? p.

By: Tony Case

Community involvement vs. conflict of interest is SPJ panel's topic sp.

CAN A JOURNALIST RETAIN his objectivity if he joins a political organization, a community group, a private club, the PTA, or even a church?
Is it wrong for an editor to accept a fruitcake from a local businessman at Christmas, even if he works on the sports desk and never edits business stories?
If an environmental reporter belongs to such organizations as Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, does that constitute a conflict of interest?
And what about a newspaper publisher: Will his paper's objectivity be jeopardized if he digs into that fruitcake or joins the neighborhood yacht club?
An editor and two journalism educators offered opinion on such ethical dilemmas at the panel "Community Involvement vs. Conflict of Interest: Can Journalists Be Joiners?" at the Society of Professional Journalists national convention in Baltimore.
Dale McFeatters, managing editor of the Scripps Howard News Service
in Washington, D.C., recalled that when he started in the business several decades ago, "If there was a written code of ethics that my newspaper had, I never saw it."
Now, however, journalists are deluged with handsome binders from their employers and handbooks from professional organizations that advise them on ethics, he noted.
"Some people have said that it is impossible to live in today's world without conflicts of interest," said Don Lambert of the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University. "So, should we just throw up our hands and not bother thinking about it, or is that a cop-out?"
When Lambert worked as a reporter some 30 years ago, everyone in the newsroom loved Christmas, he related, because local businesspeople would shower staffers with such gifts as cases of liquor and cartons of cigarettes?the latter, strangely, compliments of the proprietor of a funeral home.
While no thought was given to taking freebies, Lambert said, staffers were forbidden to wear campaign buttons, place bumper stickers espousing a political candidate or a cause on their personal vehicles, or join organizations.
"Some belonged to local churches or to the PTA," he remembered, "but other than that there wasn't much involvement."
These days, Lambert said, the pendulum has swung.
"Freebies are frowned on or forbidden in most news organizations," he observed, "and yet an increasing number of news organizations will encourage their staff members to get involved in the community."
He wondered whether or not journalists who join groups can remain objective, and whether or not the public's perception of their objectivity?or lack thereof?is altered.
If newspeople are not involved in their communities, Lambert supposed, they could risk being perceived as "an isolated elite that doesn't care." However, if a journalist joins an organization that receives favorable media attention, he risks being viewed as a "public relations pipeline" for the group, he said.
Louis W. Hodges, who teaches journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, agrees that journalists are faced with a perception problem.
"If you're not involved in the community at all and you're totally neutralized, you end up not knowing enough about the community, not being able to get enough leads and so on in order to do your job," he said.
If, on the other hand, a journalist is "totally involved in everything that goes on, if you are a power wielder in the community, then it is pretty clear in my view that you cannot escape accusations of not being objective," he added.
While conflicts of interest are inherent in every field, Hodges believes, they are of particular concern to journalists.
"All professional life has to do with a commitment to the client; a profession differs from a mere job in that precise moral respect," he said. "The journalist's client is the viewer, reader and listener to whom we have a moral obligation . . . It is totally significant that we must retain as much independence as we can and as much objectivity as we can."

What about him?

Editors and reporters are not alone in facing these moral quandaries, of course. Publishers and other corporate officers have to worry about appearances, as well.
Ohio University's Lambert related that when he worked as a reporter a few years back, news staffers "weren't supposed to get involved with anything?but our publisher sure was, and it had an impact on how things were covered."
He questioned the "moral or philosophical right" of employers to impose restrictions on journalists, "denying them the rights and pleasures of other citizens."
The way McFeatters of the Scripps Howard News Service sees it, "A distant corporate office can rotate editors in and out on a regular basis, it can forbid the staff from joining organizations, it can stop editorial writers from espousing causes or endorsing candidates, but the fact is that, when a paper does this, it has already made an ethical and even a moral judgment about itself and about the community and about the integrity and common sense of its employees."
News organizations may be faced with the near impossible dilemma of acting as community booster and at the same time maintaining an image of objectivity, but, McFeatters asserted, "Short of closing its doors and going somewhere else, a newspaper cannot extricate itself from a community."
He says that his company's newspapers "run the gamut of community involvement," which has "caused a couple of interesting problems because there is not only the journalist as an individual, there is the newspaper as an institution, as a community joiner."
McFeatters offered two examples of how Scripps Howard papers have tried to be "community citizens and found themselves in something of an ethical dustup."
Earlier this year, the Rocky Mountain News of Denver stirred controversy when it joined a drive to bring the Colorado Rockies baseball team to the city, and eventually became a part-owner, he related.
Some critics charged that News sportswriters might be biased in their reporting of the Rockies since the newspaper had a financial interest in the team, McFeatters said?despite the fact that the paper had been "up-front" about the business deal from the outset, and that it had hired veteran baseball writers who were instructed to "do a professional job."
And in Memphis, he recalled, the Commercial Appeal created "a major flap" when it agreed to provide free space in a building that it owned to the Chamber of Commerce. (Because of the controversy, the newspaper rescinded the offer.)
How intense is the struggle between the newspaper as a business concern and a cheerleader for the community and the newspaper as keeper of truth, justice and the First Amendment?
McFeatters pointed out that most newspapers in this country "were started with the avowed attempt of advancing somebody's financial or political or social goals?or all three." The fiscal aspirations of newspapers, he says, are evident in such names as the Commercial Appeal and Alabama's Montgomery Advertiser.
"The fact is that the newspaper is an economic interest," he said. "Insofar as the value of its product finds approval in the marketplace, the paper is going to thrive; where its product does not, the newspaper is going to fail."