Partial Disclosures

If you are a columnist and someone paid you $25,000 for a day of consulting, would you feel comfortable doing a story on your benefactor? Conservative columnist George Will apparently does, having collected such fees -- possibly for many years--— from media baron Conrad Black. Will wrote a column praising the now-disgraced magnate, and when asked by The New York Times why he didn’t disclose the apparent conflict, he replied, "My business is my business. Got it?"

No, George, I don’t get it when a columnist doesn’t fully disclose a source of possible bias. And I certainly don’t get it when news organizations ignore or conceal factors that may cloud their reporters’ objectivity -- which seems to be the case here in Philadelphia.

Recently, WHYY 91 FM arts reporter Joel Rose reported on the NPR network about the Philadelphia-based Pew Foundation’s desire to change its IRS status from a private foundation to a public charity. Pew’s request is mildly controversial because there are questions, among others, about just how public an institution Pew is.

It was a fine piece of journalism, as Rose’s pieces usually are. And in the broadcast, Rose disclosed that Pew supports both NPR and WHYY. But you have to go deep into Pew’s own website to discover that Pew has, for several years, specifically supported "arts reporting on 91 FM." Pew supports WHYY to the tune of $50,000 a year for "arts reporting" -- about the salary of an arts reporter.

So, should Rose have been more specific about what Pew supports? Probably not. But I would argue that WHYY, on its own website, should have. On WHYY’s website, we can read about many Pew-funded projects in the Philadelphia area that Rose and other staffers regularly report on. We read, for instance, about Pew’s controversial support of the Barnes Foundation’s move to Center City. But it is not mentioned that Pew is underwriting these stories on the arts.

In other words, WHYY does not disclose that, in effect, Pew is paying for reporting on its own activities. This might be considered a mere oversight had WHYY not recently been singled out in the public broadcasting community for its apparent dissimulation -- or incompetence -- in a similar situation.

You might remember that the station accepted grant money from the Pennsylvania EPA (funneled through a production company) for news reporting on ecological issues. The state money even came with the proviso that the reporting was to have a positive slant but neither that, nor the source of the funds, were disclosed to listeners. In a media world controlled increasingly by fewer entities, full disclosure in all instances, at all times, would be impractical at best. But for a public station like WHYY, there is no excuse for anything less than complete transparency in all matters of funding. It’s time 91 FM did better by the community they are meant to serve.

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