"Finding Journalists' Political Donations"

David Folkenflik, Baltimore Sun

Michael Petrelis has been angry at The New York Times for a long,
long time. Since the 1980s, Petrelis, a Green Party volunteer and
longtime AIDS activist now based in San Francisco, has felt that The
Times is insufficiently attentive to what he believes are the
government's shortcomings in fighting the disease. Since March,
however, Petrelis has become an online gadfly, seeking to force The
Times to reveal what he says are its political entanglements and
sympathies toward the Democratic Party. And he is beginning to get
noticed.How did it start? Jay Blotcher, a friend of Petrelis' and former
fellow activist with ACT-UP, a confrontational AIDS advocacy group,
was fired in February as a free-lancer for the Times because his
prior political life was seen by editors to have compromised him.

"They said he had a number of conflicts [of interest] that they said
called his integrity into question," Petrelis said in a telephone
interview. "To a large degree, in American journalism, we're
basically told that journalists are impartial, above the political
fray. If you go and look at the federal records, I'm not so sure
that's the case."

Petrelis began by investigating Times medical correspondent Lawrence
K. Altman, who has written extensively about AIDS, to see if he could
find evidence of political activity. He couldn't. So he went online
to read The Times' ethics guidelines, adopted in January 2003, and
found this paragraph on page 19:

"Staff members may not themselves give money to, or raise money for,
any political candidate or election cause. Given the ease of Internet
access to public records of campaign contributors, any political
giving by a Times staff member would carry a great risk of feeding a
false impression that the paper is taking sides."

By his account, Petrelis was inspired. He expanded his Internet
search of campaign contribution records, first to all employees of
The Times, and then to 50 newspapers and news agencies. And he found
a trove of contributions in recent years, including those from
journalists and other employees at Time magazine, Newsweek, The
Times, and two Sun journalists.

The gifts were largely, though not exclusively, to Democratic causes
and candidates. His findings, are posted on his Web log:
here.

Catherine Mathis, a spokeswoman for The Times, said in an e-mail
interview that Petrelis' observations were welcome at the newspaper,
and that he is not the only person to draw its attention to potential
violations of ethics rules. And, she wrote, The Times newspaper
itself occasionally trolls Web sites that track campaign
contributions to see if employees' names surface. (Two such sites are
www.tray.com and www.opensecrets.org).

"Most of the Times people Mr. Petrelis found on such lists were not
on the news staff and thus not bound by our rules," Mathis wrote.
"The handful of journalists who turned up were unaware of the rule
and highly contrite when it was pointed out to them."

But Petrelis is more persistent than most. "He's been a regular
component in my life," said Daniel Okrent, the Times public editor
who fields complaints from readers.

The 45-year-old Petrelis, who has AIDS, supports himself with Social
Security disability payments. A supporter of Ralph Nader and the
Green Party, Petrelis finds the U.S. media to be hypocritical. If
reporters support Democrats and presidential candidate John Kerry, as
his findings indicate, then they should do so openly, Petrelis argues.

Petrelis' survey is not comprehensive; it fails to examine television
companies and misses some employees of newspapers and magazines. He
does not distinguish between non-journalists who work for media
companies, those who cover hard news, and those who write commentary.
Nor does his Web-style reporting — capturing data and publishing it
online without additional checks — match that of the conventional
media.

The study found two donations to Kerry's campaign totaling $900 from
Hendrick Hertzberg, of the New Yorker magazine. Hertzberg has written
commentaries favorable toward Kerry and critical of President Bush.
Hertzberg has also criticized Nader for drawing support away from
Kerry.

In an interview, Hertzberg said he sees no conflict between his role
as an opinion journalist and his contributions to Kerry. "I don't see
it as a true ethical problem," Hertzberg said. "The idea that someone
expressing an opinion about a political race is not biased, but
giving a contribution is biased — I don't get it. I don't see how
you're compromised." Hertzberg said he asked the magazine's top
editor, David Remnick for permission before making his gift.

But that's too fine a distinction, some media experts said. "My
belief is that while opinion writers should, in fact, bring their own
opinion to what they represent, they should still be guided by
journalistic independence as a principle," said Robert Steele, a
senior ethics scholar at the Poynter Institute, a journalism think
tank in Florida. "They should be observers, not participants, in the
political process."

Georgia Marudas, a deputy business editor at The Sun, was listed as
having given $1,000 last year to the presidential campaign of
Democrat Richard Gephardt. The contribution came from a checking
account held jointly by Marudas and her husband. He made the gift
without her knowledge, Marudas said yesterday. The check bears his
signature. Editors accepted her explanation, and no action was taken.

John Scholz, a copy editor on the business desk, gave $250 this year
to the Democratic National Committee, and, in an interview,
acknowledged making such gifts in the past. "I was unaware of any
policy" prohibiting such gifts on ethical grounds, Scholz said.
Because he did not work for a political desk, he said, "it just
seemed like I was almost dealing with the abstract." Scholz, who has
been with The Sun since 1982, is retiring from the newspaper on
Friday; until then, he has been assigned to stories that do not
involve the presidential race or partisan politics in the business
section, editors said.

The Sun does not have a formal ethics policy in place; a proposed
policy is the subject of negotiations this summer between the paper
and The Newspaper Guild, which represents several hundred Sun
journalists. Petrelis' findings point out the need for explicit
ethics policies, said Timothy A. Franklin, The Sun's editor and
senior vice president. "Journalists should not be giving campaign
contributions to political candidates or political causes because it
creates the appearance of a conflict of interest," he said. "Right
now, the issue of bias in the media is a bigger issue than I've ever
seen it in the 22 years I've been in the business."

Petrelis has been angry at the media before. During the 1990s, he
participated in a campaign of telephone calls to journalists at the
San Francisco Chronicle whom he felt were covering AIDS unfairly. The
Chronicle pressed harassment charges against him and he ultimately
pleaded guilty to a series of lesser charges. The California
newspaper still has a restraining order in place against him, he said.

This time around he's fighting for different coverage through
blogging — an imperfect, evolving form of journalism that is
nonetheless forcing the establishment to take notice.