Who Really Should be Reporter of Who in the White House?
It is frightfully easy to play the “low-hanging fruit game.” The cable news does it virtually every evening (in fact, 24/7), where one network will find a story, even the most obscure of stories, and elevate it to outrage their audience base. So, I will try to avoid outrage or judgment.
In this post, I will only mention the story once, so you can easily find it online. It was published in Fox News, on February 9, 2021 by Brian Flood. As the story is much bigger than the people and/or politics involved, I won’t mention names. However, one quote from the piece does deserve attention.
University of North Carolina associate professor Lois Boynton, a journalism ethics expert, talked about improper relationships between sources and reporters stated that even if reported “relationships between sources or potential sources, and reporters ‘open the door for conflicts of interest, no matter how diligent the two parties are.’”
The Open Door
There is a renewed ethical controversy that has spilled over to the mainstream. It may be construed as political, but if done so, we leave the realm of the ethical. In that regard, I will not mention names.
The controversy talks to a reporter for a widely read online news source and her romantic relationship with a top communications officer, indeed the press secretary, for the new president and then the vice president of the United States. Though the story was not a “major secret” within the journalistic circles of the White House, when it was recently highlighted in a People magazine article, it caused more national concern.
What further fanned the flames of the relationship was the fact that the online news source, realizing the inappropriate nature of the journalist dating the president’s press secretary, moved her from coverage of the president to the vice president.
In all fairness, the journalist realizing the relationship was unethical, did report it to her news-employer. However, two problems remain. The first problem was that it is unknown if she was still covering the president-elect on election day and the second, that she has been reassigned “to cover progressives in Congress, the progressive movement, and Vice President Kamala Harris.”
In answer to the first problem, it has been discovered that the journalist was still covering the new president on February 3, 2021, obviously, long after election day and that she was advancing the president’s agenda.
Then, of course, there was the decision to allow her to keep its coverage of vice president Harris. It is hard to make an argument of a firewall. The vice president is presumably down the hallway from the president. It is hard to imagine one not knowing what the other has been doing.
While the news source correctly moved the reporter off coverage of the new president, there are numerous questions of the impropriety of simply moving her to cover the second in command.
Again, according to journalism ethics expert Boynton (my italics): “Perceptions are crucial, particularly if they affect how much trust readers, viewers and other potential sources have in the reporter’s ability to maintain independence…Across the board, trust in news media has fallen.”
Though there are added back-story issues (sadly the press secretary suffers from lung cancer), the main focus must be on media trust and whether far too many boundaries are being crossed as media outlets continue to explode.
Where We Are Being Led
It is far too easy to color these arguments in a political light. No matter which political direction in which we take a situation such as this relationship, it is ethically inappropriate. While the “romantic” in me hopes the relationship endures and the health of the press secretary greatly improves, the relationship openly constitutes the elements of a fraudulent and unethical association.
There is an opportunity for the news outlet to gain a clear advantage; there is a satisfied need in that the news outlet gains clout and greater perceived access by allowing vice-presidential coverage and rationalization can be shifted in any direction to make the relationship minimized or the backstories maximized into a feel-good story.
As our political climate has made us all more polarized, let us not forget that one of the bedrocks of our society is the independence and the ethical integrity of the so-called Fourth Estate. Let us bolster ethical training as much as possible.
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