TEMPLE: Private lives, public responsibility

By John Temple, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Saturday, March 15, 2008

Mary Altaffer / Associated Press

New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer apologized to his family and the public this week after after a report linked him to a prostitution ring.

My grandmother wasn't happy when she learned that I wanted to become a journalist.

She thought of reporters as blackmailers, people who used their knowledge of the private lives of the rich and powerful for personal gain.

In the old world of Europe, where she lived for most of her life, that meant keeping "news" out of a newspaper in exchange for cash or other benefits.

In this country, journalists gain their biggest reward by doing the opposite - by publishing news reports that hold public officials accountable, especially by revealing facts they want kept secret, facts that might alter how the public views them, facts that show they violated the public trust.

Which brings me to the story of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, a man whose unbelievable fall captivated the country this week.

Here's a case that is proof that even the most powerful cannot escape responsibility for their actions.

The reputation of The New York Times took a deserved hit recently over a story alleging that Republican presidential candidate John McCain may have had a sexual relationship with a lobbyist. I felt, as did many others, that basing such a story on anonymous sources who themselves apparently weren't sure of the allegation wasn't adequate to justify publication. The only way to gauge a story is what it says, and in this case it didn't seem the paper had the goods to merit going forward.

But the Times deserves praise for breaking the news of the governor's bizarre behavior with a high-priced hooker.

A free society is almost defined by the ability of its press to report misdeeds by its public officials, to expose corruption. And that's what the Times did.

The story has a number of strange twists. Spitzer, as attorney general of New York, was an expert in leaking information to the press, information that damaged the targets of his probes.

Now he's the one hit by the same types of leaks. I'm not suggesting the result was some sort of primitive justice. Only that it's critical in our society, as USA Today Editor Ken Paulson pointed out in a column this week, for government insiders to be able to rely on journalists to protect their confidentiality if they're going to reveal wrongdoing.

This doesn't mean that journalists should print anything leaked to them. We shouldn't. We need to check things out, as the saying goes.

But I think few would argue that New York voters shouldn't have been told that their governor, who had positioned himself as a moral crusader, had ensared himself in a prostitution ring. That fact is bound to affect their judgment of the man.

This is an extreme example of the kind of misconduct journalists across the country run into in their work. But it is not uncommon. That may help explain why journalists treat politicians with skepticism, even ones many admire, like Spitzer.

Those bemoaning attention to the story, such as Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who minimizes the importance of prostitution, are missing the point.

As governor, Spitzer is charged with upholding the law. And in his previous role as attorney general, he personally cracked down on prostitution. And in doing so he expressed a sense of moral outrage. What's the difference in his hypocrisy and that of Ted Haggard or Jimmy Swaggart?

The story is almost Shakespearean in scope. It's what we call a "talk story," meaning people can't stop talking about it because it has so many interesting dimensions. Even though the Rocky Mountain News tends to focus on local stories, we gave prominent play to Spitzer because his ordeal became a local story no matter where you live. It touches on issues that people care about, period. You could see in the number of comments on every related story on our Web site that people in Colorado wanted to talk about it.

In many such cases, government officials attack the press for reporting on their private lives. The mayor of Detroit, caught lying under oath about an affair with an aide, rails against newspapers as unfair and bigoted.

To his credit, at least Spitzer hasn't stooped that low.

My grandmother, and probably yours, could tell the powerful and prominent in our society a simple truth: If you don't want something in the newspaper, the best way to keep it out is not to do it.

This doesn't mean that the private lives of public people should be fair game.

But it does mean that if their actions in private bear on their ability to do their public job or contradict a stance they've publicly advocated, they should count on those actions being exposed.

The price of not doing so is much higher than the huge loss suffered by Spitzer last week.

John Temple can be reached at editor@RockyMountainNews.com or by mail at 101 W. Colfax Ave., Suite 500, Denver, CO 80202.