George W. Bush wasn’t the only one who didn’t know all he should have about Linda Chavez before presenting her to the American public. A lot of newspaper editors, subscribers to her syndicated column, did not know about Chavez’s role as an unpaid adviser on immigration to the Bush campaign. And because they didn’t know, readers of Chavez’s column were not made aware.
That failure of disclosure, while it probably left no reader in the dark about Chavez’s ideological leanings, did deprive readers of a piece of information they were entitled to have in evaluating the columnist’s opinion. It represented a significant departure from what has become standard, accepted, wise journalistic practice: maximum possible disclosure of potential conflicts of interest.
Indeed, at least one editor, Tribune editorial page editor R. Bruce Dold, said he would have suspended Chavez’s column had he been aware of her tie to the Bush campaign. As the editor who contracted for the Chavez column while I was editorial page editor, I take a somewhat different view: Disclosure of the tie, probably in a note at the bottom of each column, ought to be sufficient. What’s crucial is that the reader have the information he or she needs to put the writer’s views in perspective.
Let me be clear: Chavez was fully within her rights as a citizen to serve as a Bush campaign adviser. There was nothing sinister in her activities and there apparently was no effort on her part to conceal the relationship. Indeed, she mentioned it Tuesday in announcing that she was withdrawing as the nominee for secretary of labor. “I worked very, very hard for [Bush’s] election,” she said, “and I want his administration to succeed.”
The problem is that she apparently never mentioned this to the people for whom she wrote her column and those to whom they sold it.
The first notable public mention of her adviser status came last week, when President-elect Bush announced her nomination. The news agency Reuters mentioned in its stories that she had been “Bush’s immigration adviser during his presidential campaign.”
That was news to me, to Dold and, apparently, to other editors at the approximately 50 papers that carried her weekly column. In fact, it was news–though not a surprise–to her syndicate, Creators, headquartered in Los Angeles.
“I was not aware of any relationship [with the Bush campaign],” said Rick Newcombe, president of Creators, which also syndicates Tribune columnist Steve Chapman. “I do know that she’s a conservative Republican.”
Newcombe noted that “we do syndicate people with strong partisan affiliations”–he mentioned in particular Hillary Rodham Clinton, Patrick Buchanan and Dan Quayle–so it was no surprise when one had a political tie like Chavez’s adviser relationship to Bush.
He also said that the syndicate has no “formal guidelines” or process for discovering potential conflicts of interest and for notifying client newspapers, although “maybe we should.”
In a practice that is becoming common in the industry, Tribune Co., for many years has had employees annually sign a corporate “Code of Business Conduct” covering a range of prohibited business practices. Additionally, employees are required to disclose any ties or transactions that may pose a conflict of interest.
News department employees additionally subscribe to an “Editorial Ethics Policy” intended to guide their behavior in the newsgathering and writing process. There are some flat-out prohibitions–running for public office, for example, or serving on the policymakingboard of an institution that is the likely subject of news coverage. But the key concern is for disclosure, so that editors may know when a potential conflict exists and head it off well in advance by, for example, not assigning a reporter to a particular story.
Quite clearly, serving as an adviser to a political campaign–even if unpaid, even if it meant only being called occasionally by a subaltern and offering opinions already voiced in public–is an activity that would have been forbidden to a Tribune reporter. Should the same prohibition apply to a syndicated columnist?
Only, I think, if you assume that readers, when given the necessary information about a writer’s background and affiliations, are incapable of making judgments about bias and tilt and spin. Only if you assume readers are utterly bereft of the ability to discern the difference between a paper’s own news reports or editorial opinions and those of a columnist enlisted precisely because of his or her political stance or ideological viewpoint.
Disclosure? Absolutely. And on that score, I’m as upset with Linda Chavez as George W. Bush ought to be.
But exclusion? I think that goes too far.
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E-mail: dwycliff@tribune.com
