Where the Sun Doesn't Shine

Journalists don't like to politick on their own behalf; they'd much rather cover politics as a spectator sport. But every so often a few souls in Washington are asked -- if not told -- by their bureau chiefs to run for the prestigious Standing Committee of Correspondents in one of the congressional press galleries. In the case of the daily newspaper gallery, this is an inner circle, democratically elected, that makes important logistical decisions affecting coverage of both Congress and the national political conventions. Hence the tendency of the bigger newspapers and wire services to exercise their clout to get their people in there.

 So this year, chances are that if he had kept quiet, John Harwood of The Wall Street Journal, the only candidate from one of the "Big Four" national newspapers, would have won. But instead, Harwood chose to ignite a controversial issue that has divided the journalistic community ever since Ken Auletta's September 12 New Yorker article made it the talk of the town: whether journalists should disclose to their peers and the public their "outside income" -- that is, income earned from speeches and sources other than their day jobs.

"I think it's time we do a better job of disclosing the sort of potential conflicts we so often expose in the case of public officials," Harwood wrote to 2,000 colleagues in a campaign letter. In an interview, he adds, "Given the impact the media have on public policy discussions, we should be willing to subject ourselves to more scrutiny."

This philosophy did not play too well with the masses. As they paid campaign calls around town, Harwood and the Journal's Washington bureau chief, Alan Murray, could hardly help noticing that the disclosure proposal did not excite enthusiasm. "I was surprised," Murray states flatly, "to find out so many of my colleagues oppose the right thing to do."

 Yet only a handful of daily gallery members, the so-called celebrity journalists who make substantial money from speaking engagements, would likely have serious outside income to disclose. (Harwood himself says that he earned only $300 last year from an outside source, for a speech he gave to the World Affairs Council.) The vast majority of the gallery members are beat reporters who might reasonably resent what some see as an invasion of privacy. "What business of the gallery is it what my income is?" says Stephen Green, of Copley News Service, who also ran and lost. "People who are paying your salary should decide whether you have a conflict or not." Alan Fram of The Associated Press, the big winner, opposed disclosure partly on the ground that reporters are private citizens, not public officials.

Fram and Green see "philosophical perils," as Green put it, in "licensing" reporters by requiring them to reveal certain facts and activities. "That opens up a door we don't want to walk through," says Fram. "What's the next step? Voting registration?"

 Of the three press galleries that accredit reporters on Capitol Hill -- the daily, periodical, and radio-TV galleries -- only the periodical press gallery requires members to list all sources of earned income. This rule has always applied to the periodical gallery, largely because it receives more applications from people who might be moonlighting as trade association lobbyists, government consultants, or corporate newsletter writers.

 Harwood argues that he only wants the daily gallery to do what the periodical gallery already does: put the sources, not the amounts, of outside income on record for any other gallery member to look up. He would go one step further, however, and make records available to the general public, not just journalistic peers: "Put the judgment out there."

Would writing these things down prevent anything impure from taking place? Maybe; environmental lawmakers, for example, have found that the most effective laws are the "sunshine" statutes that made certain polluting practices less common simply by requiring companies to report them.

 Anyway, the results are in. Out of a field of five, Harwood lost narrowly to the three winners: Fram of AP, Sue Kirchhoff of Reuters, and Bill Welch of USA Today, none of whom share his views. Is financial disclosure for journalists an idea whose time has come? If Harwood's loss is a good sounding of the current state of journalistic opinion, the answer is: not yet.

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