Contract Ruling May Embolden Reporters to Donate to Political Campaigns

Photo of Ken Shepherd.
By Ken Shepherd (Bio | Archive)
June 25, 2008 - 11:46 ET

Joel Thurtell photo via his Web site | NewsBusters.orgStaffers for the Detroit Free Press are now in the clear when it comes to cutting campaign contributions for politicians, reports NewsGuild.org, the Web site for The Newspaper Guild, a print journalists union. (h/t Business & Media Institute's Dan Gainor; emphasis mine):

An arbitrator's decision voiding a Detroit Free Press ban on political contributions by editorial employees has implications for other publishers attempting to control what their employees can do off the job-provided those employees are protected by an appropriately worded collective bargaining agreement.

In his May 27 decision, arbitrator Paul E. Glendon ruled that the Free Press cannot ban any particular activity of its editorial employees without documenting that the activity is compromising the paper or the employees' work. Without such documentation, Glendon wrote, the company could not justify its "unilateral incursion" against contractual safeguards.

The contractual provision on which the Detroit Guild's grievance hinged reads: "There shall be no limitation upon the outside activities of any person employed by the Free Press, except that no such person shall engage in any activity that compromises the integrity of the newspaper."

At issue was a $500 contribution made in 2004 by Free Press reporter Joel Thurtell to the Michigan Democratic Party Central Committee.

The article went on to note that the arbitrator found that since there was no evidence any readers complained, the Free Press didn't make it's case for banning political contributions and hence the ban was "set aside and declared null and void."

Of course, the lack of complaints might say more about the helplessness many readers feel about liberal media outlets taking seriously their claims of bias. All the same, the issue should not be the lack of public complaint but the journalistic integrity that is compromised when a reporter donates money to a candidate or party that he may be called upon to objectively cover in a news story.

Thurtell retired in 2007 from the Detroit Free Press.

Photo of Thurtell via his Web page, joelontheroad.com.

—Ken Shepherd is Managing Editor of NewsBusters


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Why not money donations?

June 25, 2008 - 11:55 ET by Chris Norman

Why not money donations? They already donate their services...

Chris... Exactly...You

June 25, 2008 - 12:06 ET by bigtimer

Chris...

Exactly...You beat me to it!

"Never murder your opponent when he is committing suicide." ~ W. Wilson

Right you are Chris. I could

June 25, 2008 - 12:09 ET by SickofLibs

Right you are Chris. I could give a crap about their measly monetary contributions as they are probably cheapos anyway.

The number I'd like to see would be the equivalent ad-dollar value of the overt and shameless free publicity the MSM has bestowed on The One. It has to be in the billions by now. But apparently that ain't 'regulated.' (like talk radio is going to be)

Public reporting

June 25, 2008 - 12:23 ET by Dr_Liberty

Plus, with public reporting it will become much more transparent who our "unbiased" journalists are supporting. 

Of course they are neutral... it was just a random event that 98% of all journalist donations went to Democrats.

 Perhaps we should just skip the whole campaign donation thing, rewrite the Constitution and just put the Fourth Estate directly in charge.   They are so wise, you know!

<insert witty signature here>

Interesting angles

June 25, 2008 - 12:55 ET by KC Mulville

I see a few interesting angles here.

  • The arbitrator's measurement of whether the paper's integrity was compromised was based on public complaints. That implies that journalistic integrity is subjective. If the paper offers outrageously partisan sleaze, but the circulation is mostly liberal and no one complains, does that mean that the journalist has proven integrity? It seems contradictory to me to say that integrity is in the eyes of the beholder. Doesn't integrity mean you're acting despite the approval of the beholder?
  • Logically, you can't prove a negative. The threat to the journalistic integrity is more in what they don't report than what they do report. For instance, a reporter who supports a candidate may be perfectly willing to publish everything favorable about a candidate, but avoids publishing anything negative. That's biased, but how do you prove it? How do you prove that a reporter withheld negative reporting?
    • You can't, unless you simultaneously had a second reporter who discovered something negative that the first reporter skipped.
    • But that creates a sub-problem: if the only way you can verify one reporter is to hire another, you'd have to make sure that the second reporter has a different agenda than the first one. But that necessarily forces you to prove biases ... which was the point in the first place. You'd be assuming what you were trying to prove.

Let's face it, the whole idea of "journalistic integrity" is soaked with practical difficulties. Why not just abandon the whole idea? Tell the public that you're subjective human beings, and the public should read everything in your newspaper with skepticism.

Fat chance of that, right?

How much money did the New

June 25, 2008 - 12:57 ET by TE

How much money did the New York Times spend to produce and publish its unsubstantiated attack ad/smear against John McCain alleging an "inappropriate relationship" and a "romantic relationship" with some woman?  How much money did CBS, Dan Rather and Mary Mapes spend to produce their bogus, thoroughly discredited attack ad/smear against George W. Bush?  How many hundreds of millions of dollars are spent every year by the advocacy/lobbying groups like the Washington/New York press corps producing their sham "news" products smearing Republicans with attack ads?  Why doesn't the McCain-Feingold Political Speech Suppression Act limit the amount of money spent by advocacy/lobbying groups ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, MSDNC, NPR, the Associated (with terrorists) Press, al McClatchy, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News, et al.?

A reporter's Ode to The One

June 25, 2008 - 13:04 ET by SickofLibs

THE BOY FROM ILLINOIS (Ipanema)

Tall and tan and young and lovely
The boy from Illinois starts talking
And when he passes, each one he passes goes - ah

When he talks, he talks like our saviour
That raps so cool and sways so gentle
That when he passes, each one he passes goes - ooh

(ooh) but I watch him so sadly
How can I tell him I love him
Yes I would give him my airtime gladly
But each day, when he walks to the bus
He looks up into the sky, not at us

Tall, (and) tan, (and) young, (and) lovely
The boy from Illinois starts talking
And when he passes, I smile - but he doesnt see (doesnt see)
(he just doesnt see, he never sees me,...)

THE BOY FROM ILLINOIS

June 25, 2008 - 14:12 ET by DontFeedTheTrolls

THE BOY FROM ILLINOIS (Ipanema)

LOL good one, you should forward that to Rush and ask him to forward it to Shanklin.

D

Keep the ILLEGALS out, join NumbersUSA to send free faxes to your reps.

Great idea! I did just that

June 25, 2008 - 14:23 ET by SickofLibs

Great idea! I did just that

Reporters should be free to donate to whomever they wish

June 25, 2008 - 16:22 ET by kch50428

And their employers should be required to disclose the donations in their publications.