Keeping professional secrets part of modern marriage
Imet my wife at work. When we became romantically involved, it required special arrangements to ensure that our personal bond didn’t interfere with our professional relationships with our employer or cause a problem with our fellow employees.
When I left that employer after 18 years to work for The Vancouver Sun, a competitor, my wife was still a freelance contributor to my old paper. A couple of months later, some bright lights in the computer room decided her system access should be cut off because of the conflict they decided she was in because she was married to me and I worked for the competition.
As it happened, the same wizards who decided my wife was a threat had failed to cancel my computer system access when I left, so if I had wanted to snoop or wreak havoc, I could have done so even after she was cut off.
Foolish though that was, the deeper idiocy was the notion that either of us would have risked our professional reputations out of an overactive sense of personal loyalty to each other.
That same fallacy was afoot last week when CBC ombudsman Kirk Lapointe decided that Stephen Smart, CBC’S TV reporter at the legislature in Victoria, was in a conflict of interest because his wife, Rebecca Scott, works in the premier’s office as deputy press secretary.
Just so all of the potential conflicts are on the table here, Lapointe’s previous job was at The Sun, where as managing editor he was one of my bosses. He held senior media management jobs before that, both with CTV and in the newspaper business.
So unlike some adjudicators, he is not without experience in the day- today world of journalism where textbook ethics don’t always apply easily to the often messy situations in which reporters find themselves.
Which makes his finding of a conflict because Smart’s position has the “potential to diminish the effectiveness of CBC’S journalism and public standing” all that more surprising, in addition to it being rooted in a 1950s sense of family life.
Fortunately, CBC news editors are ignoring Lapointe’s ruling and keeping Smart in his job.
Lapointe was ruling on a complaint from Merv Adey, who wrote that as a reporter at the legislature, Smart “has to deal with his wife when he goes home every night. If he were to discover something that exposed malfeasance and reflected poorly on the premier, he may find himself in a considerable distress while investigating and reporting on that.”
That situation may well arise. Governments rise and fall and reporters report. The real issue for Smart and Scott is how they handle the potential for conflict that all of us find at some point in our personal and professional relationships.
Contrary to popular opinion, journalists are not locked in a constant struggle to bring down the government of the day, exciting though that might seem. We also have a vested interest in the success of our politicians; we live in the communities we report on, we have homes, kids in school and aging parents.
The issue should not be whether there are conflicts, but how they are managed. When my wife and I worked for the same employer, we avoided any situation where one of us would be reporting to the other.
No one involved in the Smart/ Scott complaint has any examples of the perceived conflict between the two corrupting the coverage of any story by the CBC. Everyone is aware that there are potential difficulties created by their relationship and they are managed to ensure that both can maintain the professionalism that their jobs require.
The notion competing professional interests can’t coexist under one roof dates back to the not- so- distant past when the model family consisted of hubby heading off to work and the good wife staying home and supporting him in every way.