Measuring the Ethics Cost of Freebies

Journalistic ethics expert Kelly McBride looked out at an audience of features editors not too long ago and told them what they didn't want to hear: Freebies are bad news.

Not just the tons of unneeded stuff that newspapers normally auction off for charity. But every single thing that staffers accept without cost, from free tickets for theater critics to the hot dogs in the press box at the football game. Copies of books and CDs fall into this category too.

"There's no way to rationalize it and say this is OK," said McBride, a member of the Poynter Institute faculty. "You can say this is the practice because of all the money pressures and practical matters and deadlines and complicating factors, but what I was arguing is that you shouldn't be comfortable with that."

The fact is that newspapers are indeed comfortable with less-than-iron-clad ethics policies. Employees, both in and out of the newsroom, walk home with freebies or get the opportunity to buy goodies like wine, toys, and books for greatly reduced prices at workplace charity auctions. Little seems likely to change, judging by the chilly response to McBride's comments at a conference of the American Association of Sunday and Features Editors. "I ran into a reaction that I thought was impractical and perhaps even out of touch," she recalled.

Journalists, of course, have long tried to figure out how to handle gifts. What do you do if a source sends you a box of candy? Or invites you out to lunch? Should it make any difference if the source is just a school board member or the governor?

Some things have changed. The acceptance of valuable gifts are discouraged, unlike the old days when baseball and football teams lavished sports reporters with TV seats, Thanksgiving turkeys and cases of liquor. Restaurant critics no longer accept free meals, and some newsrooms ban those inescapable press invitations to visit Disney World or the local zoo without paying a dime.

"Our rule of thumb is that we aren't supposed to keep anything that we don't need for a story," said Houston Chronicle Features Assignment Editor Diane Cowen, who is being engulfed by a holiday blizzard of toys.
Like many charity-minded newspapers, the Chronicle has rid itself of freebies by holding silent auctions and sending the proceeds to a local battered women's shelter.

T-shirts with company logos, however, land on a nearby counter for any newspaper employee to pick up. And books stay with the critics who reviewed them. "We don't have any hard-and-fast rules on that kind of thing," Cowen said.

Some newspapers are stricter than others. The Seattle Times has one of the nation's most stringent policies. Among other things, its staff can't accept free tickets to concerts or fundraisers that it covers. But fighting freebies isn't easy.

At the Times, the hurdles have ranged from the obvious (it isn't cheap to pay $300 or $600 to attend and cover a fundraiser) to the not-so-obvious (it looks strange when the newspaper shows up on a donor list). "We don't want to be actually contributing to these organizations. We just want to be covering them," said Arts and Entertainment Editor Doug Kim.

Meanwhile, the Times still hasn't figured out how to pay for things like movie previews, which are free to all comers. "From an ethical standpoint, it doesn't make sense to say we don't pay for movie screenings because we can't, but we pay for the things we can pay for," Kim said. "We're in the process of reviewing [our policy]. I don't think our policy works, and I don't think it's necessary to go to the extremes we go to."

Across town at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Deputy Managing Editor Chris Beringer has similar views. Free tickets don't "influence how our critics view anything," she said. "The ballet critic is not going to think more favorably of a piece because he gets a free ticket. The ethics of our people are beyond reproach on that."

And what of McBride's suggestion that newspapers never taken anything without paying? "It's probably a wonderful concept, but I don't think it works in the real world," Beringer said. "It would be nice if it did, but given what most newspapers deal with for budgets and the way you get exposed to new things, I don't think it's a very practical guideline."

McBride gets the last word. The devotion of newspapers to practicality, she said, "undermines our ability to see the picture clearly."