Q: Professor News, should journalists give money to political campaigns?
A: Absolutely not. The question was raised recently in an investigation by MSNBC.com, which found that some do. More on that later.
Professor News believes journalists should stay out of politics other than to cover it and to vote. They should not run for office. They should not do work for a candidate or an office holder. They should not participate in a rally or wear a campaign button. They should not sign a petition on behalf of a candidate or a cause. And they should not give money to a campaign.
Two of the values that a journalist should cherish most are independence and credibility. Participating in the political fray undermines both and makes the news outfit for which the journalist works vulnerable to charges of bias.
What about columnists, commentators and editorial writers? The same principle should apply. Yes, they offer their opinions, but independence and credibility should be as important to them as they are to a straight-news journalist.
Columnist George Will was guilty of a conflict of interest when he coached Ronald Reagan before a debate with President Carter. For whom was Will working? The public or the candidate? (After the debate, Will praised Reagan for a “thoroughbred performance.”)
What about journalists who don’t cover government or politics, such as a book editor or a food writer? No news employees should be exempt. The book editor oversees reviews of books about public issues. The food writer could be reassigned to City Hall.
When he was a newspaper reporter, Professor News was expected to follow strict rules against personal involvement in politics, and as an editor he enforced them. He once had to ask his newspaper’s book editor, who happened to be the sister of the publisher, to resign from a committee seeking a referendum to increase school taxes. (She did.)
Contributions by journalists to campaigns are not all that rare, as we can see from the report by MSNBC.com, the online arm of the MSNBC cable channel.
In a review of Federal Election Commission records, investigative reporter Bill Dedman found 143 journalists who made political contributions from 2004 through the first quarter of 2007.
Of that total, 125, or 87 percent, gave to Democrats or liberal causes. Sixteen gave to Republicans. Two gave to both parties.
Some donors worked for such outlets as ABC, CBS, CNN and NPR, where political contributions are forbidden. Others worked for such outlets as Dow Jones, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report, where contributions are discouraged.
Conservatives might say the report proves that most journalists are biased toward the liberal side. The list leans sharply to the left, all right. Example: Randy Cohen, who writes “The Ethicist” column for The New York Times (no kidding), gave $585 to the liberal MoveOn.org.
But conservative donors were more generous. Example: Financial columnist Liz Peek of The New York Sun gave $90,000 to the Republicans (again, no kidding).
The MSNBC.com study was criticized for being incomplete. It did not examine state records of campaign contributions and is confined to journalists in the larger print and TV news operations. It does not tell us what percentage of the tens of thousands of journalists in the U.S. contributed to political campaigns.
Even if relatively few of all journalists gave, Professor News is troubled by the findings. When the late Abe Rosenthal was executive editor of The New York Times, he said, “It’s OK to cover the circus, but you cannot sleep with the elephants.”
1 comment:
Now if only someone would remind the powers that be that newspapers should also NEVER endorse candidates. How on earth a newspaper can ever hope to retain even the appearance of objectivity when endorsing political candidates I'll never know.
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