The Editor's Desk

People interested in journalism as a field and culture might be interested to read this piece from MSNBC about journalists and political contributions.

My personal attitude is that as a field, we are being silly and pretentious when we try to pretend that we aren’t engaged as citizens in our community, using ethics as a justification.

The larger problem, one which journalism ethics doesn’t seem able to deal with, is that the prohibition against journalists giving contributions to campaigns does not even remotely reduce the appearance of bias. Bias comes from thoughts, not actions. The incorrect assumption here is: “If journalists don’t contribute or participate in political campaigns, then there is no evidence of bias, and people will trust them.” But what actually happens is that people will draw their own conclusions (and sometimes inaccurate ones) about the level of a journalist’s objectivity anyway. Does knowing that a larger percentage of journalists have given to the left than the right (in this particular investigation) change what you already believed to be true about journalists? Probably not.

The public would probably be better served if individual journalists participated in our society as they chose to and then simply be honest about it, instead of this foolish idea of trying to build integrity by hiding who we are. Evidence continues to show that it doesn’t work.

This is mostly how our ethics policy works. We don’t have a policy prohibiting involvement — we have a policy of avoiding conflict of interest. This means our reporters and editors are allowed to get involved with organizations and can donate their private money to whomever they choose. However, this also means that they cannot report news related to the areas they’ve gotten involved with.

For example, I’m a member of our local Rotary club. In the event that Rotary gets into some sort of trouble for whatever reason (not that we would), I would have to “recuse” myself from involvement with the story here at the Desert Dispatch, much like a judge would in a trial in which he has a stake in the outcome.

As a newspaper, though, we don’t get involved or donate money to campaigns. We don’t even endorse candidates. So we acknowledge the separation of the independence of our newspaper as an institution, and the independence of the people who make up the newspaper. I think that’s an important distinction.