Ethics

Funny how the debate over Bob Greene’s affair with a teenager fizzled out.

Everybody agreed the former Chicago Tribune columnist shouldn’t have done it, but few explored the broader issues of reporter/source relationships. Yet does everyone know where the line is drawn? In fact, is there a line? Why shouldn’t a reporter date a source?

The Chicago Tribune — Bob Greene’s newspaper for many years — noted in an editorial on his departure that “readers, news sources and the subjects of articles have a right to trust a newspaper, quite apart from whether they like what it prints.”

But the other side of that coin, of course, is that readers have a right NOT to trust a paper. And the newsroom has the right to be stupid, and has the responsibility of earning — earning — the readers’ trust. Trust is not a given: No journalist or other media body should expect the readers to trust them. Indeed, it should always come as a pleasant surprise when the readers do invest that trust in the newspaper, newscast, or other media package.

What does this mean to Joan Reporter? Doesn’t she have a right to a private life? As a working reporter –from London to Halifax, Montreal, Whitehorse and Vancouver— it took me a long time to accept the idea that I didn’t have a private life, that I was never off-duty.

Writing about the Bob Greene incident, Bob Steele, who leads ethics debates at the U.S.-based Poynter Institute, remarked: “Like it or not, we are always journalists, even when we are technically off-the-clock.We are much like other professionals — physicians, law enforcement officers, educators,military personnel and others — who carry a unique and profound responsibility to those we serve.” (http://www. poynter.org/talkaboutethics/091902.htm)

Always journalists.Never off-duty.That’s setting the bar very high. But if we want to be free to criticize a cabinet minister for having sex with a 17-year-old, then we’d better not do it ourselves. And yet the average citizen feels free to commit adultery or to get falling-down drunk or to exceed the speed limit without being held to account by the news media. So why should journalists live to a higher standard?

If Bob Greene was a traffic warden instead of a columnist, his affair with a teenager would have been ignored. Greene apparently went well beyond just dating a source. He bedded a student who interviewed him for a school project. Even though it only came to light many years later, Greene seems to have transgressed some line involving the youth of the girl (though technically of the age of consent) and the fact that she initiated the contact.

Would it have been different if she were in college? In journalism school? Would it have been different if he was a she and she was a he? The “what ifs”are endless. (What if he simply met her as a reporter interviewing a woman on the street?) But, as the self-appointed burrs under society’s saddle, we need to remember why we do what we do: To comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, we’d better not get too comfortable ourselves. And it may seem very uncomfortable indeed to be always on duty, always professional, always role models.

Perhaps that’s the price we pay for having so much fun.