Political donations from journalists/reporters
MSNBC has a story about which journalists make political donations (and to whom; mostly Democrats, as it turns out) and talks about the rules regarding same. Some news organisations have total bans on political donations, wheras others just ban political donations from journalists/reporters that cover politics (although as it points out, if you’re a film critic, you can end up reviewing Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” or whatever Michael Moore just put out).
I’m going to use a simple (and arbitrary) distinction here, between ‘reporter’ and ‘journalist’, where the former are literally supposed to be reporting. Yes, the distinction is not so clear in reality, but I also think that we can judge how the person in question, or their employer, portrays their output to the consumer and judge on that whether there is an expectation of impartiality encouraged or claimed.
Claimed impartiality should preclude political donations (it should also, as the most important thing, include a successful effort to achieve impartiality through seperation of opinion and action, but that isn’t the issue in which I am interested right now) and from the reporter’s point of view, I’d question whether they really think that they ought to be donating even if they are allowed to. The appearance of fairness isn’t a substitute for fairness, but it’s a necessary accompaniment (else why bother making the effort to be fair?). Margot Patterson, a journalist donor interviewed in the article, thinks it’s OK:
Patterson said the danger isn’t the journalist who reveals a bias by making a campaign contribution, but journalists who quietly hold to their biases.
Well, no; the journalist that is biased is obviously the biggest problem, but appearances do matter. If you are actually trying to get unbiased reporting out, you should be conscious of the fact that is also needs to be seen as unbiased. Sure, the secretly biased reporter is worse than the openly biased reporter or maybe even than the reporter who is reporting fairly despite open support for one political side, but why should we have to settle for that, anyhow? Why should employers of journalists have to settle for that?
This is all somewhat abstract. It’s not going to be possible to report on things without getting some sort of opinion about them, but some individuals certainly can keep their opinion and their actions seperate (defense lawyers, for example, probably have to do that quite often and I know I had to separate political opinions from my work back when I was a teacher). Reporters* that can’t keeps opinions and action seperate should be doing something else (punditry, perhaps, or something out of the media altogether). I don’t think that most or even many people would be suitable for the job of reporting because a lot of individuals prefer to align their opinions with their professional actions and there is nothing wrong with that at all, of course, in most jobs.