The reporter: Nancy Wright

What do you do when you suspect a colleague has a hidden agenda? My bureau chief and I did nothing, despite our shared concern that Debbie Bookchin — a respected, prize-winning reporter — had evidently become a cheerleader for Bernard Sanders, one of the candidates she and I covered in the 1990 race for Vermont’s only [open] seat in Congress.

Within days of Sanders’s landslide win, Bookchin quit her job. Eight months later, she became his press secretary.

Was Bookchin’s behavior during the campaign evidence of bias? Or had scurrilous campaign tactics forced her into an unholy alliance with the Sanders camp?

It seemed the congressional race had no sooner kicked off when GOP operatives began employing McCarthy-like tactics against Bookchin and me, bombarding our editors in an effort to censor stories that might damage Peter Smith, their freshman incumbent.

They spread the word that I was out to get Smith. And they charged Bookchin with a pro-Sanders bias based on the fact that her father was a renowned anarchist scholar and her mother a member of the Green movement.

Although their methods caused me to bristle, I had learned to turn a deaf ear to Vermont’s political thin skins. But Bookchin said she’d never faced such vehement attacks. As the campaign heated up, her anger manifested in ways that raised questions for me and, eventually, my bureau chief, Jack Hoffman, as to whether she had lost her objectivity.

Whenever I wrote anything casting Sanders in an unfavorable light, she read me the riot act. But she praised stories reflecting poorly on Smith. She suggested we lighten our work load by each covering just one candidate. She’d take Sanders and I could have Smith. I refused.

Once, Bookchin seemed to know more than she should have about a potentially damaging story. Sanders’s people had accidentally faxed me a paper trail they were creating for tax auditors. It had all the makings of a great story — one that everyone from the campaign treasurer to Sanders himself tried to get me to drop. Minutes after their efforts failed, Bookchin called me, apparently to try to find out how I planned to handle the story.

In time, Bookchin’s words began to be filtered through the campaign itself. On one occasion, her criticisms of me were echoed by Sanders’s campaign press secretary. On another, her assessment of Smith’s tactics became Sanders’s own words at a news conference.

I never confronted Bookchin. I am not management and do not feel it’s my place to deal with personnel problems. Instead, I brought my concerns to my bureau chief. At first, Hoffman dismissed me with an ardent defense of Bookchin. But as election day drew near, he too became concerned. By then, she seemed to be arguing every campaign issue exclusively from Sanders’s point of view.

The 1990 congressional race was the hottest political contest Vermont had seen in a generation. Editors put us on alert that bias charges were flying and began combing our copy for anything that could lend credence to the charges.

Yet they couldn’t possibly know what was going on behind the scenes unless they were told. Should Hoffman and I have protected our colleague or told the editors what we suspected? The evidence seemed circumstantial and incapable of supporting a bias charge. We kept quiet.

Right before the election, Bookchin bought a $14,000 car, put her house up for rent and moved in with her mother. Several days after the election, she resigned from the Herald after ten years of service.

Although Bookchin cited health reasons (migraine headaches), I had to ask the obvious question. "Are you going to work for Sanders?"

"No, never!" she insisted.

When Sanders announced the members of his new staff, there was one gaping hole: no press secretary. I asked if he was planning to hire Bookchin. Sanders said no. He wasn’t going to have a press secretary at all, "Because they’re a waste of money and I can speak for myself."

Six months later, AP reported that Sanders had hired a press secretary: Debbie Bookchin (at a salary of $48,500 — $19,500 more than she made at the paper).

I was disgusted, but not surprised. I’d seen it coming. Hoffman told me he was "disturbed and dismayed" but took no action.

I was convinced we had to do a story examining Bookchin’s relationship to the campaign and whether there had been a quid pro quo involved in her getting her new job. Word was out that our competition was working on an expose that Bookchin said she feared would be "a hatchet job." Better we should look at ourselves than have somebody else do it for us.

Managing editor John Van Hoesen, a close friend of Bookchin’s, said he wanted to treat the issue in a column rather than a "cannibalistic news story." But if I could come up with a "smoking gun," he’d let me do it, adding that he felt uncomfortable about assigning me since I was so close to the situation.

We argued for two solid days. By the time I got the go-ahead, I had been humiliated and made to feel that, by insisting we take a look at one of our own, I had committed the worst possible crime.

The clamor didn’t end there. Reaction to the two stories I ended up writing was just as explosive. My first piece established no hard evidence of a clandestine deal. However, it did show Sanders’s people considered her on their side — so much so that Sanders was said to be worried her favorable reporting might backfire.

My second story looked at the scores of Vermont journalists who’ve gone to work for politicians over the last 30 years. It was the first time the cozy relationship between the press and the politicians here had been exposed. And everyone — reporters, editors, politicians and flacks — scurried to suppress the debate.

First to react with vigorous defenses of Bookchin’s integrity and their own were several former reporters now working in PR. Nick Marro, now with the University of Vermont, wrote in an op-ed piece: "Because of the smallness of the state’s population, Vermont cannot afford the luxury of purity." The late Governor Richard A. Snelling, long an equal-opportunity employer for Vermont journalists, chimed in on the same note.

The Herald, a prolific breeding ground for flacks, used Snelling’s statements as a hook for an editorial stressing that no breach of ethics had occurred.

But it was my bureau chief’s column that really jolted me. Ignoring the concerns we shared prior to election day, Hoffman wrote that he had to ask himself why Bookchin couldn’t change her mind. "I’ve stewed about it for the past week" he ruminated, "but somebody else will have to cast the first stone."

So be it. In a profession where truth is our stock in trade, we shouldn’t be afraid to take a critical look at ourselves. And it shouldn’t take such an ugly process to report our findings.

 

The editor: John Van Hoesen

Nothing weighed heavier on the collective mind of the press here this summer than the hiring of former Rutland Herald reporter Debbie Bookchin by Congressman Bernard Sanders. By the time 300 column inches on the story had come and gone, the exhaustive discussions of press ethics in the 90s had produced enough fodder for a college course.

The day AP broke the story, our newsroom buzzed and the consensus was: This did not look good.

Nancy Wright, the reporter who worked with Bookchin, believed pieces were falling into place that raised questions about the newspaper’s coverage of the campaign. Although she had never before raised concerns about Bookchin’s objectivity with anyone but her bureau chief and both had dismissed them — now she went into high gear to get the story.

The only complaint Wright dug up was from Peter Smith, the defeated Republican incumbent who’d complained about both Bookchin’s and Wright’s fairness. Now he said Bookchin’s appointment confirmed his suspicions. But — apparently forgetting that he’d hired a Burlington political reporter as press secretary days after his own election — he added: "I think it’s unfortunate from the point of view of the whole [Vermont] press corps."

So the debate was on. What kind of a story should we do, why hadn’t a story like this been done on similar appointments, who would write it, who would edit it, was our campaign coverage and the paper’s integrity now suspect, what were the paper’s obligations to cover itself as it covered other institutions?

A top-level meeting was called. We decided that an editorial column was appropriate for a hard look at our coverage and the issue of reporters leaving journalism for press or public relations. We also decided to continue investigating the possibility of unfair reporting.

We might have deflected criticism had we assigned staffers who had limited relationships with the people involved. But Wright was pressing to do the story and we allowed her to, even though there was concern she might feel betrayed by her former coworker. I bowed out because Bookchin had been a colleague and friend for more than 10 years.

Questions still flew in the newsroom.

• Was it legitimate to question the appointment at all? Yes. Every day, we pursue stories because they’re topics the public is talking about. This appointment surely met that test. Also, there was Smith’s complaint, albeit solicited by us and scarcely unbiased.
• Was a different standard being applied here? No one remembered a previous instance in which so much was written with so little evidence of conflict. In a meeting, editors recalled name after name of Vermonters who’d left journalism to work as press secretaries or PR people. And nothing was recited more often than Smith’s own choice of a press secretary. Yet coverage of this magnitude hadn’t even been considered at that time.
• Was there evidence that coverage of Sanders had been too favorable? We had a fair amount of perspective on this. Bookchin had covered Sanders while he was mayor of Burlington and they’d repeatedly clashed over her aggressive reporting. Also, in a lengthy Sunday magazine article entitled "How Socialist is Bernard Sanders?" she took a hard look at the mayor’s politics that included strong criticism from socialist experts around the country. Finally, when Sanders was trying to prove he could work with Democrats, a Bookchin feature story raised doubts that launched one of the main campaign issues against him.
• Do a reporter’s known personal beliefs inhibit his or her ability to be professionally objective? Most reporters and editors I know vote and hold political beliefs but do everything possible to keep them separate from their professional work.
• What assurance was there that the overall election coverage had been fair? All major campaign stories were discussed before written and each had at least two or three separate edits by longtime professional copy editors.
• Important to all our decisions was the knowledge that Sanders had offered Bookchin the job sometime around June, after she left the paper for health reasons, and she refused it. This undermined the suggestion that the hiring was prearranged before her resignation.
• Finally, should newsroom discussion on the preparation of the story be included in the published article? This issue was raised when Wright took notes on our phone conversation planning the story. I had no idea she considered the discussion an interview, while she believed it was hypocritical to think everything wasn’t on the record.

A discussion of sources, notes, taste, libel and story focus must be considered a workplace conference. What’s public is what the paper puts on the page.

The upshot: Six days after the story broke, we published a 62-inch front page story by Wright and a follow-up the next day about similiar appointments.

What are the lessons we took from our enforced self-examination?

1. Perhaps reporters who cover political campaigns should be required to refrain from joining political staffs for a certain period after elections. At the least, news organizations might adopt policy statements discouraging such immediate employment.
2. Develop a written ethics policy, possibly based on that of the Society of Professional Journalists, although additions are needed to cover specific situations.
3. Turn the spotlight on yourself and assign reporters and editors you’re certain have no conflict or appearance of conflict.
4. Make sure that you’re not using sheer volume of copy as a substitute for truth.
5. Be mindful that the reason journalists walk out the door is often for more money and pay them well.
6. A newspaper lives by its integrity. Reporters and editors must adhere to professional standards with the strength and tenacity of tigers.

Some newspapers call them "truth boxes," others call them "ad watches." The text of a candidate’s television commercial is given, accompanied by a reporter’s analysis of the truth of the campaign statements made in the ad.

The truth boxes represent a new and growing effort this election to monitor political advertising on TV. They also represent acknowledgment by the print media of the power of the tube: Elections today are determined by 30-second TV spots, not by what the candidate says in policy statements or at the Kiwanis Club.

Los Angeles Times media writer Thomas Rosenstiel said that newspapers had been on a "nostalgia trip" in the way they covered campaigns. "The irony of political coverage by newspapers in this country is that the reporters frequently never saw what the voters saw, they never saw the nightly news because they were traveling with candidates. So, they were covering, essentially, the wrong campaign."

The L.A. Times is often credited with starting the truth box movement. Julie Wilson, who was the Times’s political editor and is now editor of its Ventura County edition, said when the Times first started analyzing ads, candidates and their managers were shocked and angry. She said now they accept the truth boxes as routine. "When campaigns launch an ad, they either invite us to a showing or they send us a tape . . . with documentation," said Wilson. "They send us their own truth boxes."

The Sacramento Bee also ran truth boxes. Bill Endicott, The Bee’s capitol bureau chief, said he believes the boxes made campaigns realize that "they can’t put out totally unsupported charges."

Some television newsrooms have also gotten into the act of monitoring ads on their own stations. WVUE in Austin, TX, put spots for gubernatorial candidates to the truth test. The first test on an ad for Clayton Williams resulted in the candidate pulling the ad and changing it.

Not everyone agrees that the truth boxes really have had any impact. Marc Chimes of Nordlinger Associates, a Washington-based political consulting firm, said "I don’t think anything is being revealed, resolved, or cleared up." Chimes said the truth boxes have not had any effect on races in which he has been involved.

Chimes also questions whether it’s the media’s role to analyze ads, since usually deception is not involved, but "shadings of truth," which is a subjective matter.

The subjective nature of truth boxes worries many journalists. Wilson of the L.A. Times said "we wanted to make sure we weren’t stepping over that line between news analysis and editorial statements." Other papers resolved the dilemma by giving the ad reporter the editorial license of a movie critic or columnist.

Critics point out that political spots are paid advertisements. Why should they be subject to closer scrutiny than other ads? Endicott of The Bee says the answer is simple: "These people are running for public office and asking people to vote for them. I think it’s comparing apples and oranges to compare elected officials to Sears Roebuck."

Ted Glasser, a journalism ethics professor at Stanford University, said analyzing ads is consistent with the media’s watchdog role. "The press is supposed to be involved in reporting and commenting on public affairs. Political advertising is the quintessential form of public affairs these days, fortunately or unfortunately."

Glasser is concerned the ad analysis being done doesn’t go far enough. Journalists need to look beyond the "factual accuracy of the ads" to the message the visual imagery conveys. Some newspapers are trying to do this.

Ironically, truth boxes which are, in part, a reaction to the negative campaigning in 1988, are being used for negative campaign ads by opponents. The L.A. Times’s Rosenstiel believes it’s not the job of journalists to stop attack ads. "Mudslinging is an old and cherished tradition in this country. All we can hope to do is referee the sport so that it’s handled properly."

A week before the general election of November 1986, editors at The Charlotte Observer faced an ethical dilemma with the ultimate potential consequence of a wrong decision – death.

Even now, it is possible to write safely about the case only by avoiding the use of some names and specifics.

Three candidates were running for two positions on a minor, non-partisan board in one of the dozens of North and South Carolina counties covered by the Observer. During a routine check of clip files, a reporter discovered that one of the candidates had the same name as someone who’d been a leader in North Carolina’s Ku Klux Klan decades before. The Klan leader had pleaded guilty to several misdemeanor crimes, one of them in connection with a Klan shootout.

The reporter called the candidate.

"Must be someone else," said the candidate, a businessman. "I’ve never had anything to do with the Klan."

The reporter hung up, dissatisfied. She recalled reading a yellow clipping about the Klan leader which mentioned his small hometown in another state and which named some relatives. It was the same hometown listed in the candidate’s biography.

The reporter called the hometown and sought out the relatives. Whatever happened to their family member who’d come up to North Carolina and been active in the Klan years before? Where was he now?

"Funny you should ask," one of them told her. "He’s gone straight for years and now he’s running for political office."

The reporter knew she had a story. Not a big story – the political office involved wasn’t a particularly important one, the Klan activities had taken place more than a decade ago. But it was a story nonetheless.

If former Kluxers and admitted criminals were going to run for office, they had the right. But it was the newspaper’s right – indeed, obligation – to make sure readers and voters knew about their character and background.

When the reporter called the candidate, he confessed. And he pleaded that she not run the story. It was something long ago in his past, he said. That kind of activity was behind him. He’d made a new life, he said. Even his family didn’t know.

The reporter and I had just started to discuss the implications of the story when my phone rang. It was a local official of B’nai B’rith. He had just gotten a call from the candidate, whom he described as an " old friend," and needed to talk. He arrived at my office breathless.

"If you print the story about (the candidate) and the Klan," he said, "you’ll be making a terrible mistake. Everything in the clips about the Klan and the crimes is true."

"But there’s one other thing. He was in the Klan as a plant. An informer. For the FBI. Working with them and with us, he prevented more Klan violence than you’ll ever know. He wasn’t a devil in the civil rights struggle. He was an angel."

I thought that made it an even better story.

"But, you don’t understand," the man from B’nai B’rith protested." He sent people to jail. No one knows to this day he was an informer. If you print this information, he’ll end up at the bottom of the Catawba River."

He mentioned the name of former Observer staffer who had covered the Klan in the 1960s and 1970s. "Ask him," the man from B’nai B’rith said. "He knows the whole story." I called the former staffer, now a senior Knight-Ridder executive. He was stunned.

"Everything the B’nai B’rith guy tells you is true," the executive said." To write this story could mean death (for the candidate). It’s so dangerous, I’m surprised (the man from B’nai B’rith) told you. It might have been better just to let you go ahead with the original Klan rather than reveal the secret."

The reporter, her editor and I met to consider our options.

One of them was going ahead with the original story. It would, after all, deal with what was on the record. But even though the story would be factual, it wouldn’t serve the truth.

Printing the true story would certainly serve the public in the fairest way possible, leaving it to individual voters to decide what they thought of the facts. But that could put the candidate in physical danger.

Doing nothing was an option that left us all unsatisfied. If the candidate were elected, the original story about the Klan involvement would surface somehow. The newspaper could be accused of knowing relevant facts about a candidate and keeping them secret. And there would be no way to explain why we had done what we did.

With no clear idea of which way to go, we called the candidate. It was his life, after all, and we wanted his thinking on what we should do. We realized we were taking a rare ­ and, for some, uncomfortable step: consulting with the subject of a story about how it should be written and whether it should be written at all.

As the reporter and the candidate talked, the candidate came to a decision. That afternoon, he dropped out of the race, citing "personal reasons." The Observer played the story in a few paragraphs below the fold on the front of the local section. The story contained none of the behind-the-scenes information.

I suppose we can be accused of withholding the truth, even manipulating the political process. Instead, I see it as a case of simply acknowledging that we must hold ourselves responsible for the consequences of what we report, not just the truth of what we report.

In February 1987, when Texas savings and loan regulators met privately with Speaker of the House Jim Wright in his office — a meeting which would ultimately weigh heavily in his being driven from office — I was sitting in the back of the room taking notes.

I first met Wright when I profiled him for The New York Times Magazine. He interested me and I decided to write a book on his first two years as Speaker. He cooperated by letting me observe any meeting which his staff attended. Nothing was off the record, and he had neither a financial stake in nor editorial control over the book.

This meeting had been requested by the regulators to lobby Wright on a bill he opposed. The discussion centered on real estate values and economic policy, but one regulator did promise Wright that in return for his support of the legislation, they would go easy on individual S & Ls whenever Wright wanted. Wright rejected this offer, specifically said he was concerned about policy and not individuals, and repeated his opposition to the bill. (When the bill was finally voted on — and after Jim Baker’s personal lobbying — Wright did support the regulators.)

Nine months later a Washington magazine called Regardie’s ran a story which was filled with distortions and inaccuracies about the meeting. The story charged that Wright had "summoned" the regulators and put his "bootheel" on them until they promised to lay off one particularly slimy S & L operator. This simply did not happen. Regardie’s also lifted material from my Times profile of Wright — without attribution — and distorted it.

Wright’s nemesis Newt Gingrich distributed the Regardie’s article to every member of Congress. National reporters were given copies and began talking and writing about it. Wright was suddenly the target of an ethics investigation.

The situation raised a number of ethical questions for me. Did I have an obligation to try to set the record straight? If I did, would I be improperly crossing the line between observer and participant? This issue was complicated by the one restriction that Wright had imposed on me: to reveal nothing that I had observed until 1989. Surely, he would have waived that restriction here but that would have only made me seem more complicit.

I never really considered feeding the material to another journalist because of the same problems and if the story was unattributed, it would have been virtually meaningless.

There was also the problem: If I did publish a defense of Wright, where would I? I was by then working full-time on the book and had no outlet.

It was in my interest to remain silent. If I did publish something that helped Wright, when my book appeared critics would have ammunition to argue I had been co-opted by my subject.

I talked over the situation with journalist friends, getting differing opinions on what I should do. In the end the self-interest argument — which was really cowardice — prevailed.

I wrote a letter to Regardie’s editor, but limited it to the issue of not attributing and distorting what was lifted from my Times story. The magazine printed an edited, emasculated version of my letter, including a weaslely admission and apology.

I thought that was the end of the matter. It wasn’t. Later Banker’s Monthly reprinted the story in two parts. After part one appeared, a Wright aide asked me for a copy of my original, unedited letter to Regardie’s. He planned to take it and other proof of distortions and inaccuracies to Banker’s Monthly. Although he didn’t say so, it was obvious that he wanted to block publication of part two.

In addition to all the earlier arguments against my involvement, how could I approve of, much less help, his effort to prevent publication of an article? In my mind this amounted to prior restraint which every journalist instinctively opposes.

But more and more, I began to think that my first responsibility was to get out the truth. And the reprinting of the story confirmed that a falsehood was entering the public domain as truth. We all know how we work. Once published information makes it into our files we are much more likely to repeat it than check it. Even if false, it has the power of truth. Norman Mailer coined the word "factoids" for such falsehoods. Finally I decided I should disclose what really happened.

But how? If I tried to freelance the story, I had no guarantee if or when it would be published. And I still feared being seen publicly as siding with Wright. So I wrote a new private letter (which later became public) citing my notes of the meeting in detail and gave it to Wright’s staff.

Ironically, if his staff had asked me to do that, I probably wouldn’t have. Banker’s Monthly printed part two but included a 2,000-word rebuttal from Wright.

Would I handle the situation the same way again? Frankly, no.

I should have recounted what actually had happened at the meeting in my letter to Regardie’s. I hadn’t because I had allowed my self-interest, disguised by peripheral issues about objectivity, to deflect me from my primary responsibility — reporting the truth.

The odd couple — the stumbling populist governor of Minnesota and the former Green Beret turned newspaper publisher — pulled it off. But after the Russians split town, there were many who thought they’d witnessed a new low in Minnesota journalism. And there’s a reporter — me — still wondering if he did the right thing by saying he’d pull his byline off a story in protest of what the publisher was doing.

For months, Minnesota Governor Rudy Perpich had been suffering a popularity drought, his bid seeking the endorsement from the Democratic Farm Labor party growing tougher each day. It hadn’t helped that his erratic behavior was so embarrassing that it caused Newsweek magazine to nickname Perpich "Governor Goofy."

The convention was to begin June 8. It would be four days after the whirlwind plunge into the heartland by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev who had accepted Perpich’s invitation to see how the high-tech state surrounded by farms really worked.

Gorbachev knocked the socks off the normally staid Minnesotans, and Perpich rode that fresh euphoria to victory at the convention days later, getting the party’s nod on the first ballot.

And Roger Parkinson, publisher of the Star Tribune helped ensure it, even putting up a $300,000 letter of credit on the newspaper’s account to guarantee a loan to pull off the biggest political event in the state’s history.

The journalism hat he wore as publisher was left on the coat rack. Instead, he reached for the familiar one of civic booster. He cleared his desk of newspaper work to direct the governor’s task force coordinating Gorbachev’s visit.

The newspaper’s guild, mistrustful of Parkinson because of his demand during last year’s contract talks that wages be frozen despite record profits in the company’s history, saw Parkinson’s working for the governor in an election year as just another example of how out of touch he was journalistically.

In 1985, Parkinson worked on bringing the All-Star Baseball Game to Minneapolis. Then he was a key player on the governor’s task force to bring the 1992 Super Bowl to Minnesota. He was chair of the U. S. Olympic Festival which was brought to the Twin Cities this summer and involved in the attempt to get the 1996 Olympic Games staged here.

In protest, the threat of a reporters’ byline strike swept through the newsroom a week before Gorbachev’s arrival. The guild told Parkinson: "Your role as a key player in news-making events makes it difficult for us to explain to our readers that our newspaper is an effective watchdog. It is difficult for us to claim objectivity in covering the governor’s race when our publisher is working hand-in-hand with the incumbent."

Star Tribune Reporter Dennis McGrath, was one of many assigned to cover the visit. He felt stonewalled. "He (Parkinson) said, ‘I can’t tell you anything.’"

The perception of an objectivity problem was worse. Since Parkinson controlled the newspaper’s editorial board and the board was faced with endorsing a candidate in the fall, wouldn’t it look to the public and rival politicians like the governor had the publisher in his pocket?

Parkinson apparently felt it was the newsroom’s problem to dispel the perception by 8,000 visiting journalists that the Star Tribune was an inside player. "There the ultimate proof will lie in our treatment of the visit and Minnesota’s judgment about its objectivity," he said.

I’d been assigned to cover the San Francisco portion of the Gorbachev tour. After a week of indecision, I finally decided I couldn’t put my name on the story and the only professional thing to do was tell the editors that before I got on the plane, not when I was sitting in a $175 hotel room overlooking San Francisco Bay.

 

Executive Editor Joel Kramer was extremely angry at first. Outrageous, he said. Is your disagreement worth harming the paper’s image?

I said something about not wanting to be 70 years old and have regrets about not standing up for something I believed in, that there comes a time when you’re stuck in a traffic jam and you wonder who you are, and how Parkinson should have first considered the position he was putting his reporters in.

If that was the case, Kramer said, then I was off the plane. I spent nine hours on "Gorby Day" doing rewrite. Meanwhile my wife, a reporter for the competition, was sitting in the kitchen of a Minneapolis family entertaining Mrs. Gorbachev and having a great time. (Besides her, there were two representatives from the Star Tribune’s public relations department while Star Trib reporters had to stand outside and wait for information.)

By a 4-l margin the reporters surveyed decided a byline strike of the Gorbachev stories wasn’t worth it. They didn’t want to embarrass the newspaper in front of national reporters, even though their publisher had embarrassed them. It was, in reporter Tony Carrideo’s words, "what kept Joel Kramer from going ballistic."

The motorcade swept through the Twin Cities, Roger Parkinson in one of the lead limos. At one point when the motorcade stopped, Parkinson got out and, along with KGB agents, pushed the crowd away from the Soviet entourage as Gorbachev worked the crowd.

Weeks after what is known cryptically around the newsroom as "the visit", copies of a doctored picture still hang. The photograph of Parkinson has been transposed — from a full head of hair, the publisher has suddenly become bald in the same fashion as Gorbachev. There is a birthmark imprinted on Parkinson’s forehead, in the same spot as Gorbachev’s. The birthmark is a perfect outline of the state of Minnesota.

Nobody in the newsroom is expecting Roger to find religion after all this. But it’s assumed he got the message.

When I encountered Albert Thompson, it was 18 years after he had stabbed a playmate to death.

The Wayland Town Crier published an interview with Thompson, who had just accepted the highly-politicized job of executive director of the Wayland Housing Authority, on June 13, 1985. The next morning, Editor Andrea Haynes received the first of what would be many anonymous phone tips.

That call started Haynes and her staff on a summer of investigating and writing, and agonizing over whether to reveal Thompson’s past.

Information from newspaper accounts and off-the-record sources helped piece together the story:

When Thompson was a 12-year-old living in Wayland, Boston suburb, he killed 6-year-old Mark Dupuis by stabbing him in the head and face 23 times. Dupuis had been hit in the shoulder by Thompson during a jackknife-flipping game and began to cry. Thompson, fearing the boy would tell his mother, panicked.

Thompson was arrested that night, and, found guilty, sent through the state’s juvenile system. He had been a troubled child, physically and sexually abused by his stepfather.

The staff of the Town Crier, three full-time reporters and two editors, assembled facts for a story it might never publish.

We talked to everyone we could find, including the reporter who had covered the 1967 killing and the murdered boy’s mother. No one would go on record.

The staff also discovered fraudulent entries on his resume. The paper printed stories about those and other discrepancies in his professional record while deciding what to do about the childhood crime in Thompson’s past.

As information accumulated, staff meetings became more frequent. Many were held in the publisher’s office on a speaker phone to the paper’s attorney. He assured us that legally we could publish the story about the playmate’s killing, despite the sealed juvenile records, since so many years had passed and this man was now in a public position.

The ethics involved the juvenile records, the private lives of public officials, the extent of knowledge in the community and the public’s right – or need – to know.

As a reporter, I was often torn between protecting Thompson and the public’s right to know.

At every staff meeting, no matter how many new facts had surfaced, the ethical arguments remained, and the staff’s decision was always split.

We asked ourselves if Thompson was entitled to privacy: Hadn’t he paid his penalty? Should he be judged only on his actions as an adult?

Did the public need to know about his past?

The staff was not in a position to judge his motives or whether he was an unbalanced threat to the public, or to the tenants.

Housing Authority members knew about his past when they hired him. But they learned about some falsifications on his resume from our stories.

We could discern no general feeling in the town that he shouldn’t have the job. Tenants had expressed support, not fear.

Was he newsworthy because he was a public official, or because he had returned to his hometown?

The staff decided that summer not to publish what it knew, but kept the subject open. We just couldn’t decide that he was enough of a threat to risk harming him.

But then-publisher James Hopson, who had just joined the paper and chose not to override Haynes’ decision, later said the story should have been printed. "Al Thompson forfeited any claims to privacy when he sought a public position," he reasoned. ". . . It’s a hell of a news story."

Boston magazine, a 124,000-circulation monthly, agreed. In November 1985, writer John Strahinich broke the playmate stabbing death story, calling it "The Bogeyman Comes Home."

Strahinich said he had told Thompson he’d write a story – whether or not he cooperated. Thompson talked – about childhood beatings, suicide attempts, reform school and two marriages. And the killing. It sent waves through Wayland.

Haynes wrote a column explaining why the Crier hadn’t broken the story, and the paper also ran news and reaction pieces.

In April 1986, the Housing Authority voted 4-1 not to renew Thompson’s contract, citing poor job performance and deteriorating relationship with the board. He resigned in May.

Six months later, Thompson hanged himself.

The news was a shock but I felt relieved that we hadn’t revealed his story a year earlier. Still, I wondered whether a small-town weekly breaking the story could have helped Thompson.

If we had printed a balanced treatment that allowed him to get everything off his chest, he may have been able to deal with his past and his problems more rationally. I now think we should have printed what we knew.

Hopson agreed. Being sensitive and restrained, he said, "didn’t do much for the journalistic credibility of the Town Crier. All of the explanations and clarifications in the world don’t change that fundamental fact that we got our pants pulled down on a big story."

Were Texans voting for Ann Richards on Nov. 6 or Victoria Barkley, the matriarch played by Barbara Stanwyk on television’s "The Big Valley"?

And what role did television news play in allowing such a media fantasy to be substituted for the real thing?

Much has been written about the Texas governor’s race between Ann Richards and Clayton Williams, but these two questions deserve more attention. They are at the heart of how we elect candidates and the ethical responsibilities of television news in covering those elections.

The process begins when the candidates and consultants decide on an image and then produce advertisements showcasing that image.

In Williams’s campaign, the imagemaking began with the "chuck-wagon" ads, which featured Williams dressed as a cowboy out on a cattle drive. His popularity zoomed when the ads started airing.

That’s only half the battle, though. For one thing, no one believes everything he or she sees in a television ad.

But, as an image-maker, if you can control photo opportunities and media events so that the fictional image of the advertisements is repeated on the nightly news, that’s a real victory. The nightly news has more than credibility: Television news has convinced many of us that it is our very "window to the world," that it is actually showing us reality. And it’s free. Not a bad deal if you can get it.

Both candidates got it in Texas. In the end, though, Richards got it better than Williams — mainly because she stayed on the carefully marked image-makers’ path, while Williams wandered off in the campaign’s final days and shot himself in both feet.

In the primary, Richards had established herself as tough enough to be governor. She reinforced that with such photo opportunities as her toting a gun and going hunting.

Down the stretch, as Williams showed himself belligerent (refusing to shake her hand and saying he’d rope her "like a heifer"), Richards started to stress the other side of the frontierswoman — appearing in postures that showed compassion, modesty and the pioneer woman as keeper of such civilizing values as education.

And Texas TV newscasts showed the posed pictures that reinforced the image. Richards sitting alone and modestly sewing a button on her dress on the campaign plane on election eve. Richards carrying bouquets (to emphasize the feminine and the idea of winning). Richards surrounded by persons of color and promising better educational opportunities.

It all came together in one of the last images viewers of KXAS-TV (Channel 5, the NBC affiliate in Dallas and Fort Worth) saw of Richards before they went to the polls. It led the station’s 6 o’clock news report on Richards Nov. 5. It began with Richards bent over an African-American boy of about 10 with his chin gently cupped in her hands.

As viewers saw this, they heard the Channel 5 reporter say, "And she pleaded with a little boy to remember her as the gubernatorial candidate who wanted more money for poor school districts."

The camera stayed tight enough on Richards and the boy to give viewers the sense they were eavesdropping on a very private moment. And, then, viewers heard Richards say to the boy, her voice cracking with concern, "I want you to do something for me, Chad. I want you to study hard when you go to school. And I want you to go to college."

It was the kind of emotionally-hot picture TV cameras can’t or won’t ignore. And that’s the problem. Savvy political consultants know that if they can stage such pictures, TV news will show them.

There have been attempts to improve coverage in this governor’s race.

WFAA-TV (Channel 8 in Dallas and Fort Worth) managed to show Williams talking to aides about how he was about to stage a confrontation with Richards for the TV cameras at one gathering. According to Dallas Morning News TV critic Ed Bark, showing that instance of calculation hurt Williams badly.

KERA-TV (Channel 13, the public television station in Dallas and Fort Worth) kept after Williams when he refused to appear in public debates, offering him alternative forums in hopes of getting him in a situation not totally controlled by image-makers. Williams finally agreed to an interview just before the election.

During that interview, the journalists got a flustered Williams to confess that he didn’t know what the one proposition on the ballot was about (gubernatorial appointments) and that he couldn’t remember how he voted on the proposition when he voted by absentee ballot.

But, overall, the fundamental dependence on staged pictures has not decreased. Part of the problem is that the relationship is not widely understood. Several newspapers, for example, tried to dissect candidate ads this fall. But they dealt only with the accuracy or deceit of the words, instead of what the image projected.

Ultimately it is a matter of conscience. ABC anchor Peter Jennings said that there are times when television news operations have a responsibility to avoid hot pictures that make for "good television" in hopes of facilitating rational discourse and understanding.

Is Jennings saying that there are times when television must dare to be boring?

Yes.

Jennings himself took the dare in a prime-time "Peter Jennings Reporting" special on the politics of abortion Nov. 1. Jennings said in a pre-air interview that he and his producers had purposely avoided the hot pictures of confrontation — what he called "the shouting and the screaming and the saliva" pictures — "because it is an issue which is so emotional."

Jennings’ report was panned in The Washington Post, because "it strips the abortion debate of the passion and personal depth of feeling that . . . pitted opponents against one another with the ferocity of opposing armies."

If the high road is paved with reviews like this, you can understand why broadcasters might not be lining up to take Jennings’s dare.

After all, Victoria Barkley, frontierswoman from "The Big Valley," makes for better television than Ann Richards, civil servant from Austin.

Windsor (Ontario) Mayor David Burr’s relationship with his secretary had been the source of persistent rumors around the city. Fuel was added to the fire when The Star learned that the mayor had separated from his wife, which was reported in a short story in the newspaper.

After a secret meeting of the city council, Burr announced he was going on a trade mission to Japan, Hong Kong and China, and that his secretary Kim Wilson was part of the delegation. That’s when Star city hall reporter Marty Beneteau started questioning why a secretary with no apparent credentials for this kind of goodwill trip was tagging along at taxpayers’ expense.

Wilson was appointed to the delegation in her capacity as twin cities coordinator, a job that involves promoting cultural and economic ties between Windsor and similar-sized communities abroad. Burr had given her the post shortly after his election in 1985, taking it out of the city administrator’s office.

Following the closed council meeting in which Burr unveiled his plans, two councillors approached Beneteau in a hallway, visibly upset, suggesting the reporter find out more about the trade mission.

Beneteau approached Burr before he lowered the gavel on the council’s weekly public meeting, and the mayor detailed his itinerary, who was going along and why. The issue of his relationship with Wilson was not raised.

Beneteau returned to the newsroom, and troubled about this missing element in the story, consulted with a fellow city hall reporter. They agreed that the relationship was now entering the spectrum of public interest, and that Burr should have a chance to answer the rumors.

Beneteau contacted the mayor by telephone at his home, explained the situation and asked: "Is Kim Wilson your girlfriend?"

Burr, who was upset about the line of questioning, acknowledged that he had heard the rumor since his separation and flatly denied it. The conversation ended abruptly.

Although all his instincts as a 10-year reporter told him the alleged relationship was pertinent to the Far East mission, Beneteau realized that this was not an element to the story that could be tossed in without some serious consideration. The personal lives of two public people were about to be exposed. The credibility of the reporter and his newspaper would be called into question.

Night assistant metro editor Doug Firby immediately agreed the issue was of legitimate public interest. But since the newspaper was dealing mainly with rumor and innuendo, Firby was concerned about being fair and at the same time thorough.

Facing both a legal and ethical dilemma, the reporter and editor talked about the fine line between conveying what they knew to be true and what had in fact been substantiated. That the mayor acknowledged the rumor and its circulation around city hall effectively provided the basis upon which the information was used.

Another factor was the obvious tension it had created among city councillors, pushed to the limit by Wilson being named to the trade mission.

Beneteau and Firby discussed exactly how and where the relationship should be played, agreeing that it should not be the lead but simply a detail addressed in the body of the story. The matter was dealt with in two sentences, toward the bottom of a 21-paragraph story that constituted a straight news account of the trade mission.

On the day the story appeared Beneteau met again with the mayor in his office to pursue information on the trade mission that was to cost $20,000. Burr’s relationship with Wilson surfaced again in the conversation. Beneteau explained at length that the rumored relationship with Wilson had been of no consequence until she received city tax dollars to go abroad.

Burr accused Beneteau of taking a "cheap shot" by using the mayor’s acknowledgment and denial of a rumor as the basis for that element of the story.

The Star made no further mention of the alleged relationship until it was raised by other media at a news conference. The mayor himself raised it in an address to the city council in which he condemned The Star and attacked Beneteau personally. And yet again on a radio talk show the following morning.

Wilson filed a complaint with the Windsor Media Council, a local media watchdog, against the newspaper and Beneteau. In it, she denied the relationship and charged that she had been wronged by the newspaper.

The complaint was withdrawn by Wilson when confronted with overwhelming evidence, including sworn statements by witnesses, that she had, in fact, been engaged in a relationship with Burr.

Despite the mayor’s continued denials that there was anything between them, on Oct. 29, 1988, after announcing he would not run for re-election, Burr and Wilson tied the knot.

On a radio program just prior to his departure from city hall Burr attempted to explain his sudden attraction to Wilson by saying The Star’s persecution, like Romeo and Juliet, had brought them together.

Star reporter Rob Ferguson monitored the program, and his curiosity was piqued when Burr suggested the newspaper hired private detectives to shadow Wilson and him. Ferguson contacted the mayor and he immediately backtracked on the allegation, calling it an "off-the-cuff remark."

Ferguson wrote a brief story, but it never saw print. Management decided that enough had been said, let the mayor ride off into the sunset with his final slap at The Star. The scandal is dead and buried, and Burr was last seen looking for a job.

Middle-class taxpayers bearing the brunt of the $500 billion S&L bailout? "Not with my bucket, buddy!", wrote Seattle Times columnist John Hinterberger. Hundreds of readers wrote back in agreement, asking "what can we do?" Hinterberger told them, and now the "Not With My Bucket Brigade" is 800 members strong and growing, afire with the idea that Joe Lunchbucket can beat Washington after all.

A popular cause, but is it the place of a newspaper columnist to be leading the rally? Making the news, rather than commenting on it?

Times editor Michael Fancher believes columnists have "special license" to do things beyond what a reporter should, "even if they’re wrong and outrageous."

"We pay them to bring a point of view," he said.

Fancher said even if a columnist’s viewpoint was unpopular, even racist or sexist, he wouldn’t intervene. "The readers would let him know if he was out of sync, anyway."

After the first "Bucket Brigade" columns, Hinterberger said Fancher sent a note, "Great stuff — go ahead with your revolution!"

And go ahead he did. At the suggestion of managing editor Alex MacLeod, Hinterberger took off for Washington, D. C., in late July, bearing the message of the people to Seattle’s congressional delegation and filing reports for the Times.

The Bucket Brigade has a busy schedule of town meetings and rallies before the November election. Candidates not in step with the Brigade’s views have been targeted for defeat. KING-AM talk show host Mike Siegel is also involved, giving the campaign another medium.

The Bucket Brigade’s message is appearing almost weekly in Hinterberger’s columns. That’s OK with Fancher, who says he has no problem with the campaign as long as it’s kept "within the confines of the column, and doesn’t compromise fair and balanced news coverage."

Macleod doesn’t think the credibility of their news will be hurt. "I don’t think readers see it as anything other than John Hinterberger on his soapbox."

A few of the candidates were suspicious when KTIV-TV in Sioux City, Iowa, first contacted them to offer two minutes of free air time. What’s the catch? Where’s the hidden cost?

But that reaction changed to "Wow! This is great," said KTIV program director Dave Madsen.

KTIV-TV offered two minutes at the end of newscasts to twenty-one legally-qualified candidates in this fall’s elections. The only stipulations: Candidates couldn’t fill the time with existing commercials and the time had to be used to discuss the issues.

"The broadcast industry has been accused of waging war with 30-second spots," said Bill Turner, KTIV-TV vice president and general manager. "We wanted to give the candidates a chance to talk directly to the viewers."

It was for the same reason that WPSD-TV in Paducah, Kentucky, began offering free time to candidates in 1984.

"I was at a broadcasters’ convention and someone asked then-Senate candidate Mitch McConnell why he didn’t talk about the issues," said WPSD president Fred Paxton. "McConnell answered, ‘Because you guys aren’t interested. How much can you say in 30 seconds?’"

Driving home, Paxton said he thought about McConnell’s comments and decided he was right. Paxton made up his mind "to remove the filter between the candidate and the voter."

This election, WPSD offered each candidate for Kentucky senator four 2-minute time segments to discuss issues. The candidates for Illinois governor and senator were given two 2-minute time slots. The candidates’ statements were played in the middle of the newscasts.

"We tell the candidate that we’re turning the camera on and that in two minutes we’re turning it off," Paxton said.

Both WPSD-TV and KTIV-TV offer studio time to record the candidates, bringing in camera crews on the weekend and on overtime to accommodate a candidate’s busy schedule. The stations will also send a photographer to where the candidate is, even if it means traveling a hundred miles. "It can get expensive but it is worth it," Turner said.

"It is not an exercise of generosity," said Paxton, "but journalism."

Do the protectors of free speech have an obligation to stifle their own political voices?

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services has touched off an ironic debate on this issue in many newsrooms. In at least one case, it cost a reporter her job.

In reaction to the court’s decision, Vicky Hendley, an education writer for the Vero Beach (FL) Press-Journal sent letters of protest to the 160 Florida legislators. She included a tiny copper coat hanger in each envelope "to make sure that the letters weren’t just looked at by an aide and thrown away." Hendley completed her project at home and didn’t identify herself as a journalist in her letters.

A Pensacola News-Journal reporter saw the coat hanger on a legislator’s desk and decided that there was a story in Hendley’s unique statement. He called her for an interview.

Hendley was surprised that her political statement got so much public attention. "That’s what citizens should do," she said, "write to their legislators."

She was even more surprised when she got fired. "My former employer didn’t think it was ethical for me to talk to another reporter," she said, but maintained that she did not violate the company’s conflict of interest policy because education was her beat, not abortion.

"If it was a school issue and I wrote a letter to school board members, I think that there would have been a conflict of interest because I deal with these people on a professional basis."

Richard Wagner, Managing Editor of the Vero Beach Press-Journal, said that Hendley stepped over the line of permissible activity when she became a news source. "It’s very difficult to separate your profession from your political life when you grant interviews to other news organizations," he said. Political activity stops being personal business when it calls the newspaper’s objectivity into question.

Everyone involved agrees that organizational credibility and the individual’s right to expression are important. The disagreement is about how to balance the two. And, in the battle, important issues are being ignored.

Those who want to maintain an appearance of objectivity for the news organization create policies that fail to address what to do when reporters’ feelings really interfere with dispassionate coverage.

The public knows that reporters may hold strong political views even if they don’t march in demonstrations. Professional commitment to provide balanced coverage is what keeps reporters’ political views out of the news columns, not apathy.

But professional commitment may not always be enough to overcome emotion. Every reporter should be allowed one moral conflict of interest.

Hendley said that abortion is hers, that she had told her employers about it, and that it is unrealistic to expect reporters to be objective about every issue.

"Someone who’s been raped may not be able to do a rape story; someone married to a city council member should not cover the city council. Editors should give reporters a chance to be human," she said.

But it doesn’t follow that reporters should be allowed to express their views through non-journalistic political statements. Journalists already have a unique forum in which to express their judgments.

Journalists are, by profession, civic and political activists. They bring matters of importance to public attention and frame the public debate. The question is not whether journalists should be allowed to participate in public political activity, but whether or not they should be allowed to exert influence in public arenas beyond the one they already control.

Because of the potential for exploitation, the answer has to be "no."

A cause that has a reporter or columnist or editor in its ranks gains credibility through the journalist’s association. Even if the journalist-activist wants to maintain a low profile, no one could blame the organization exploiting the PR value of having a local anchor or well-known columnist as a supporter.

Journalists cannot remove their professional cloaks when they leave the newsroom. No good journalist is ever completely off-duty.

Who would have sympathy with a public official who assumed that some important announcement was off-the-record because a reporter happened upon the story at a party rather than in the office?

Journalists cannot drop professional affiliation when it is convenient for them or for their cause. People who wish to work on behalf of a particular cause should work in public relations or advocacy groups, not for the news media. Journalists should confine their public voices to their own professional arena.

For further analysis of this issue, see "Agreeing to disagree."