Still Smarting in Salt Lake

By: Lucia Moses Maybe it's just a dream, but some good could come out of the Salt Lake toxic spill after all. While The Salt Lake Tribune recovers from The National Enquirer scandal, ethicists hope it will get news leaders elsewhere talking about ethical no-nos in their own shops.

"If you're discussing scenarios and consequences routinely as an organization," said Keith M. Woods of the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., "people will think twice about doing it." Speaking broadly of a culture in which plagiarism is only a mouse click away and leaders flat-out lie to the public, he noted, "You can't rely on society to provide you automatically with people who have clear direction."

Meanwhile, the Utah daily is working on cleaning up its own house after discovering that two of its reporters sold information about the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping case to the supermarket tabloid, which published it in a July 2 story alleging that there was a sex-tinged scandal in the Smart family, a story the Enquirer recently retracted. The Tribune is now under the editorial leadership of Nancy Conway, whose predecessor, James E. "Jay" Shelledy, resigned amid criticism that he didn't react to the situation aggressively enough.

As E&P went to press, the Tribune planned to run on May 11 an unedited article about the episode by Joel Campbell, a Brigham Young University professor it hired to write an independent account. And two Poynter faculty members visited last week to meet with news staffers and discuss their impressions with management. "I feel good about their recovery," said Pam Johnson, one of those faculty members. Among staffers and executives, she said, "There's a lot of desire to move forward."

Legally, the Tribune may be in the clear. Smart family lawyer Randy Dryer said it's unlikely the family would sue the paper. John F. Flynn, a University of Utah law professor, said the family wouldn't have had much of a case, anyway. The Smarts are public figures for the purpose of such a lawsuit, which would make it hard to prove they were libeled as a result of the paper's failure to supervise its employees, he said.

But internal debate over whom to blame for the scandal and whether warning signs were missed isn't likely to be settled so quickly.

For some, the breach by Kevin Cantera and Michael Vigh, the lead reporters on the Smart story, seemed to come out of nowhere. Tim Fitzpatrick, the paper's managing editor, said, "Basically, what you have to go back on is, they wrote multiple stories [for the paper] that were holding up." But Connie Coyne, the paper's reader advocate, said the national attention given the story should have led Shelledy to provide the reporters with more oversight, either by a seasoned colleague or editor. And, once he learned of their transgression, he took too long to tell readers and staff about it, she wrote on May 3.

Shelledy said he didn't see the need for closer supervision: "They were good reporters. They had very few errors." When the reporters entered into a business arrangement with the Enquirer without the Tribune's permission, Shelledy told E&P, they violated a policy already in existence. "I think the ethics policy of that paper was pretty tight," he said. As for criticism the policy left too much room for interpretation, he noted, "You just can't cover every situation."

Having a sound policy isn't enough if staffers don't know what it is, though, said Society of Professional Journalists President Robert Leger. Apparently, that was just part of the problem in Salt Lake City.