Harvard and the hypocrites

By Joel Thurtell

Back in 2007, when top brass at the Detroit (so-called) Free Press reprimanded me for donating $500 to Michigan Democrats, then threatened to fire me if I ever again dared exercise my right as a U.S. citizen while employed by the selfsame, self-proclaimed Free Press, I felt pretty lonely.

Most of my colleagues at the (gag) Free Press seemed either noncommittal or downright hostile to the notion that a journalist might consider it his right to take part in the process loosely called “democracy” in this country. But eventually, an arbitrator sided with me and ordered the newspaper to rescind its ban on political activity by employees.

Now, there’s an essay in Harvard’s journalism review, Nieman Reports, supporting my view.

Wow!

It seems I’m not a raving lunatic or oddball social misfit for believing that journalists, like every other U.S. citizen, are born with certain rights that can’t be alienated by intellectually-deprived newspaper bosses.

Reed Richardson’s article in the Nieman journal and his post in Eric Alterman’s blog at The Nation, bring into the open a discussion that has frightened and embarrassed journalists who want to take part in politics, but whose bosses — and worse, many colleagues — behave as if having a political opinion is some kind of ethical lapse comparable to plagiarism or insider trading.

I’ve been hammering this issue here at joelontheroad.com for almost two years — almost since the time I left the pardon-the-expression Free Press late in 2007.

I don’t feel so lonesome now.

At the time, my great support came from The Newspaper Guild. I was encouraged and coached by Lou Mleczko, the union local’s administrative officer in Detroit. Lou told me he was hearing from some Guild members unhappy that the local was supporting me. Many of my colleagues at the (choke) Free Press had drunk the Kool-Aid passed around at J schools and newsrooms and looked at someone who claimed a citizen’s right to take part in democracy as some kind of crazed saboteur.

Eventually, Guild attorney Duane Ice made the newspaper lawyer look like a stooge who flunked his bar exam, largely because the paper’s owner, Gannett, simply had no justification for abridging journalists’ right to express themselves politically. 

Richardson quotes Nation columnist Eric Alterman, who has a view diametrically opposed to that of newspaper managers like those at Gannett and the New York Times, whose form of tyranny reigns supreme in most newsrooms. According to Alterman, “You can be an incredible partisan and still be very fair.”

That statement is absolute anathema to most journalists because it laughs in the face of a huge myth in American journalism — the idea of what Richardson called “the press as umpire.”

At this point in his essay, Richardson brings up the example of my case against the Gannett managers. I’ll quote the entire passage about “press as umpire”:

Perhaps the clearest distillation of this ideal to appear recently occurred during the early stages of the 2008 presidential campaign. In June 2007, MSNBC.com investigative reporter Bill Dedman identified 143 working journalists—out of a total of roughly 100,000 nationwide—as having made campaign contributions during the previous four years. “Because appearing to be fair is part of being fair,” he wrote, these donors had essentially violated their journalistic duty to be impartial arbiters. “They have opinions, like anyone else, but they are expected to keep those opinions out of their work.”

Finding clear evidence of this last point would have been the equivalent of an ethical smoking gun, proof positive that newsrooms are justified in clamping down on the mere appearance of political bias, lest actual bias run amok within their news coverage. Dedman made almost no effort, however, to find evidence linking these donations to biased coverage. Neither did the Detroit Free Press, which tried to ban all political donations by employees after two of its journalists’ names surfaced in Dedman’s story. An independent arbitrator struck down the newspaper’s new ethics rule as unnecessarily broad and pointed out that despite the claim of harm to the paper’s reputation, Executive Editor Caesar Andrews had conceded that the paper “did not possess or even look for evidence that [the donations] compromised the Free Press’ integrity.”

Dedman told me that to focus solely on the fairness of journalistic output misses the point. “An umpire only has to cheer for the Red Sox during the game once to call his objectivity, his independence, into question,” he contends, in drawing the analogy that many make of the press as serving the role of an impartial umpire. “It matters how he performs his job, yes, but it also matters that he appear not to take sides.” But as both his own and the Free Press examples demonstrate, even when it is in the best interests of a story or a news organization to examine both, there still exists a powerful tendency to let appearing to be fair become the de facto lone standard. This has perhaps never been truer than now, when withering newsroom budgets and unprecedented staff cutbacks have left few mastheads with barely enough time to get a newspaper out the door or a broadcast on the air, let alone to consistently parse their news coverage for creeping bias.

It is worth reading Richardson’s blog post in The Nation, if only for the transcript of his interview with New York Times standards editor Craig Whitney.

Whitney proclaims the idea that if journalists keep their opinions under wraps, avoiding the appearance of a conflict, there somehow is no conflict. Or something like that. When Richardson presses him to explain, Whitney tells him “we’ve exhausted this subject.”

Gannett tried the “appearance of conflict” gambit in my case, and it backfired.The paper’s honchoes couldn’t show that my $500 donation to the Democrats did any harm to their business. Such hypocrites. I discovered that many Gannett execs had made similar donations to political parties, except they gave lots more money that I did.

Moreover, it came out that several newspaper managers had contributed money to a political action committee and charged the cost back to the company, which is against the law.  One of them — Paul Anger, top guy at the Unfree Press — actually did it AFTER he forbade my giving future donations to political causes.

Brazen hypocrisy.

Those company-paid political donations were not the only place where newspaper managers ran afoul of the law. I discovered that in Michigan there is a statute called the Bullard-Plawecki Employee Right-To-Know Act that forbids employers collecting political information about employees. Here on JOTR, I likened it to Red Squad activity. (When the Michigan State Police were forced to divulge contents of their political file-keeping in the 1970s, my name turned up in the file. When Free Press editors began tracking my political affiliation, they violated the Michigan Employee Right-To-Know law.

To date, it seems that I’m the only one harping on the Red Squad aspect of newspaper managers’ trampling on journalists’ rights. But who knows — a couple years ago, I felt pretty lonely tilting against the biggest newspaper chain in the country, and now Harvard is on board.

Drop me a line at joelthurtell@gmail.com