PressEthic

I was still musing on yesterday's class discussion of when, if ever, it's appropriate to publish personal details about someone's health status or sexual orientation -- when I came across an interview that aired last Friday, 27 October 2006, on NPR's "On the Media."

It seems The Spokane Spokesman-Review, which covers a large swath of northern Idaho, recently faced exactly this issue.

It all started when a blogger named Michael Rogers alleged -- in his blog and on a liberal radio program -- that Idaho Republican Senator Larry Craig is gay. This is not the first time Rogers has outed a prominent public figure he deemed hypocritical, but although Rogers's previous outings have gone unchallenged, in this case, he "offered only the testimony of four men whom he did not name." However, if Rogers's allegations are true, Senator Craig's gay-unfriendly voting record certainly constitutes hypocrisy -- but does it justify invading the senator's personal privacy?

With the story already circulating publicly, The Spokane Spokesman-Review faced the risk of violating Craig's privacy if they chose to run the story. But overlooking a story that had already generated substantial attention would've brought the paper's "journalistic transparency" into question.

In his "On the Media" interview, Steve Smith, the editor of The Spokane Spokesman-Review, explained the paper's decision-making process:

"The fact that it was a story in Idaho, that it was a story in the community and was generating enormous heat in the blogosphere, which we monitor closely, telling us that it was having a material effect on the political climate in Idaho, where Larry Craig is campaigning actively for the Republican gubernatorial candidate, that compelled us in the end to decide that we had to acknowledge the existence of the story..."

Smith added:

"Well, context in something like this is everything, and the story at this point is, in part, assertions of Craig's sexuality, but it's also very much the impact of those assertions and the public buzz developing during a very contentious election season. And where the Foley scandal is so fresh in people's minds, and in our local area, the Jim West scandal is so fresh, it took on relevance that it might not have had at another time or place."

Notably, both before and after The Spokane Spokesman-Review decided to cover the Senator Craig sexual orientation story, Smith and his colleagues asked readers to weigh in via the paper's website. They even webcast their morning news meeting, in which the story was discussed.

This prompted some to argue that this unusual degree of transparency -- in which the paper's deliberations were opened to the public -- effectively brought the story to the public, even before the paper formally printed their story about the allegations.

In his "On the Media" appearance, Smith defended the paper's decision-making process, but acknowledged that such concerns are not completely unfounded:

"We were simply joining that conversation in as careful and thoughtful a way as we possibly could. But...[h]ad we chosen then not to produce a story in print, the conversation and the discussion itself certainly would have telegraphed the fact that this story exists to anybody who was tuning in."

Here we see an excellent example of a reputable paper striving to make an ethical decision. But in revealing their decision-making process to the public, I would argue that the editors risked damaging Senator Craig's reputation -- even without explicitly running a story.

True, the information was already public -- via Rogers's blog and radio appearance. But as an established, traditional media outlet (arguably the paper of record for northern Idaho), The Spokane Spokesman-Review's mere acknowledgement of the allegations gave real media legs to a rumor that otherwise might have just bounced around the blogosphere and then faded. Moreover, the paper first released information about Senator Craig's sexual orientation in a format that did not allow the senator to comment in his defense (because the story was essentially focused on the paper's ethical deliberations, not the blogger's accusations). This also seems unfair to the senator.

Does anybody else care to weigh in on the situation? Was The Spokane Spokesman-Review reckless in their attempts to be transparent? Or should all newspapers strive to be so open with their readers?