From Clarke to NSA: MSM non-disclosure seems to violate their corporate ethics policies
From CBS parent Viacom’s formal ethics policy:
From the New York Times’ formal ethics policy:
Both CBS’s and the NYT’s ethics policies state that their employees should avoid both conflicts of interests and the appearance of conflicts of interests. Both corporations’ news operations appear to have violated these policies.
In its 60 minutes interview of Richard Clarke last year, CBS did not disclose that its parent company would profit from the free publicity given to Against All Enemies, published by Viacom’s Free Press imprint. Somewhat similarly, the New York Times did not disclose that portions of its NSA story by Risen and Lichtblau came from James Risen’s State of War, to be published January 16, and, according to the LA Times, the NYT did not want to be scooped on a story by its own reporter.
In the former case, the Viacom organization stood to directly profit from the undisclosed cross-promotion; in the latter case, the NYT’s credibility would arguably be damaged by not reporting a story which appeared in one of its employee’s major books. In each case, these giants of the MSM should have disclosed the full situation, to avoid, at minimum, the “appearance of a conflict” of interest — in the words of both their Corporate Ethics Handbooks.
It seems to us pretty clear that these non-disclosure are not oversights — far from it. The CBS and NYT news organizations and the entire MSM delight in reporting non-disclosures and conflicts of interest by others. So why did they not disclose the commercial, reputational, or other interests at work in these stories? For CBS to disclose the Clarke tie-ins would have lowered the news value of its story, and arguably hurt sales of Viacom’s book. The NYT’s reasons for non-disclosure seem not so clear. Would the disclosure lower the news value of the story by highlighting the NYT’s year-long delay in reporting it? Would the disclosure hurt the bump in its flagging circulation the NYT was undoutedly hoping for from a week-long serial blockbuster? Or are there other reasons? In any event, the conscious non-disclosure of a relevant fact about the reporting for the stories and the Risen book is enough in our view to meet the standard of “appearance of a conflict of interest.”
If the MSM do not go out of their way to achieve transparency in their reporting, they only have themselves to blame when their credibility continues to be challenged and their audience continues to decline.