PressEthic

For reporters on the Silicon Valley tech beat, fair and balanced reporting on Hewlett Packard may be next to impossible, considering how some were secretly investigated by the computer giant in an attempted by board members to find out who had been leaking information to the press.

According to a number of reports on the story, investigators for HP used pretexting and spyware to obtain phone records of reporters from the New York Times, CNet, Business Week, and The Wall Street Journal.

In a September 8th article in The San Francisco Chronicle, right after the story broke, Verne Kopytoff reported:

“Shawn Berman, a management professor at Santa Clara University, called Hewlett-Packard's behavior Big Brother-like and said that the scope of its board's mismanagement is breathtaking.

‘I've seen this whole saga as really pushing the frontier as to what's acceptable in the world of ethics,’ he said. ‘I don't think there's any board that has spied on its own members and private citizens.’”

Today, Ken Spencer Brown, of Investor’s Business Daily wrote that in the wake of a “scandal bound to go down as a classic case study in journalism and PR textbooks,” there are many uncomfortable issues for ethical journalists to consider:

“Many questions arise. For example, should news outlets reassign reporters to ensure personal grudges don't taint coverage? Will reporters be a lot tougher?”

Brown reports:

“'Each person is going to have to answer the questions for themselves,' said Christine Tatum, a business editor at the Denver Post and president of the Society of Professional Journalists. 'Could you continue to be objective and fair and accurate and balanced about a company that felt entitled to rifle through your private information? It's dicey.'"

Brown also notes that of the journalists who were probed by HP, most of them dropped their coverage of the story and handed the ethically compromised story to other staff to report – a move that could be seen as unfair to those who worked hard for their beat, but undoubtedly the best choice for “balanced” reporting.

Whether or not the journalists who replace those probed in the HP scandal are able to fairly report is still up for debate, though I'm sure that their work will be thoroughly scrutinized either way.

But I also suspect that for the time being, HP and the other large Silicon Valley companies have probably learned a hard lesson, especially since several board members of HP have resigned over the scandal, and the legal ramifications for the invasion of privacy are still being investigated.