Errors and Omissions

Veteran freelance reporter on Catholic Relief Services payroll

The Baltimore City Paper had a bombshell last Wednesday on a veteran columnist for the Baltimore Sun, Jefferson Price:

...After taking a buyout in June 2004, the former foreign editor and correspondent had been writing opinion pieces for The Sun under a pair of yearly freelance contracts. Since January 2005, he’s also been on the public relations payroll of Catholic Relief Services (CRS), the Baltimore-based humanitarian aid organization run by the U.S. Roman Catholic Church....

According to the article, the Sun stopped publishing Price's column in May but didn't inform readers that it was doing so or the reason for it.

Well, now we know. The Sun fired Price because he was writing pieces at the direction of CRS on issues important to CRS. Another excerpt from the article:


“This is an ethical breach of major proportions,” says Sun editorial page editor Dianne Donovan, who says she canceled Price’s column early this month after she discovered that he was, in fact, routinely writing about CRS-affiliated programs in his columns—and had been all along.

Of course, it turns out that Donovan knew that CRS was funding Price's travel, but somehow she and the Sun editors believed that he wouldn't write about CRS issues.


Associate editorial page editor Will Englund echoes Donovan’s position, saying it was understood at The Sun that Price was to “stay away from writing directly about CRS activities and find his own material. . . . Maybe this was a line that couldn’t actually be drawn.” The two editors most closely involved in supervising Price’s column, op-ed editor Richard Gross and assistant editorial page editor Ann LoLordo, did not respond to questions from Media Circus. Gross declined to comment; LoLordo said she was too busy to talk.

Umm, yep. I'd be too busy to talk, too, if it were me. Please read the entire CityPaper article: it's excellent.

newspapers, media, errors

posted by Unknown @ 6/10/2006 08:52:00 AM