The reasoning here is dubious at best: if Mitchell stating that Wall Street’s problems began after her husband left isn’t problematic, what is? But it’s more rigorous than the explanation I received, back in June 2007, when I asked Bloomberg L.P. how it would cover a presidential run by its founder, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Bloomberg’s answer (the company’s, not the mayor’s) came in an e-mail from Judith Czelusniak, Bloomberg L.P.’s head of public relations. “Bloomberg News, which has won hundreds of awards and honors from its peers for its fair and objective reporting and its investigative reporting, adheres to the strictest standards of attribution and objectivity,” Czelusniak wrote. “We cover every issue according to these standards.” Or, to paraphrase: at Bloomberg, we’re so good that we simply don’t have conflicts of interest.
The Ifill glower
True, some conflicts of interest are routinely acknowledged by news organizations and individual journalists. The Boston Globe has finally figured out that it should always mention that its corporate parent, the New York Times Company, owns part of the Boston Red Sox, for example. And Slate media critic Jack Shafer regularly notes that he’s a Washington Post Company employee (and anything else that strikes him as potentially problematic). Furthermore, mismanaging a conflict can still cost a journalist his or her job: witness former Globe reporter Tania deLuzuriaga, who left that paper after it was revealed that she had an affair with new Miami-Dade school superintendent Alberto Carvalho (then a school administrator) in Florida while at the Miami Herald — and wrote painfully compromising e-mails about it.
There’s also an obvious motive for keeping quiet when a thorny conflict looms. After all, the press’s commercial success is predicated on the idea that we’re credible purveyors of information. Acknowledge too many potential conflicts of interest, mention them too frequently, or explore them too deeply, and we risk undermining that basic premise.
Problem is, the current approach is even worse. When potential conflicts aren’t disclosed voluntarily — or when they’re justified with reasoning that wouldn’t pass muster in a freshman journalism class — the public gets a double message: we (the media) aren’t as hard on ourselves as we are on everybody else; and we don’t trust you (the public) to draw responsible conclusions about subjectivity and objectivity.
At a time when trust in journalism is at an all-time low, neither is a particularly winning strategy. And as both L’Affaire Ifill and CJR’s reporting on Mitchell suggest, if the mainstream media doesn’t grapple with its own conflicts, plenty of other parties are willing to do it for them. In other words, when it comes to media reaction to real or perceived conflicts of interest in the press, Schieffer in ’04 is the past, and Ifill in ’08 is the future. Heading into the Hempstead debate, that’s a point Schieffer himself might want to ponder.
To read the “Don’t Quote Me” blog, go to thePhoenix.com/medialog. Adam Reilly can be reached at areilly@thephoenix.com.
