In August, the Cleveland Plain Dealer hired four political bloggers, two on the right and two on the left, to write a group blog called “Wide Open.”
One of the bloggers on the left was Jeff Coryell, known as YellowDogSammy on Daily Kos. In previous blogging positions, but never with Wide Open, Coryell had frequently criticized Rep. Steve LaTourette (R) of Ohio’s 14th district. Coryell had contributed $100 to LaTourette’s opponent in the 2008 election. LaTourette complained to the online editor at the Plain Dealer (presumably on the assumption that Coryell would be a pain in LaTourette’s side throughout the campaign) who then took the issue to the top editor at the newspaper. They asked Coryell to never write about LaTourette as a condition of working at the paper.
Coryell declined and was fired. What’s stunning is that even though the Plain Dealer knows the difference between journalists and bloggers—it hires journalists to write objective news stories and hires bloggers to write partisan commentary—it held a blogger it hired (with the instruction of being partisan) to the non-partisan standard of journalists. Journalists in many newsrooms can’t give money to politicians because it might compromise their objectivity in the eyes of their readers. That makes sense. But a blogger isn’t objective! They are explicitly hired not to be objective! You would almost expect that they find multiple ways to support the candidates that represent their politics.
What’s even stranger is that the firing came only as a result of pressure from an elected official. The Plain Dealer is arguing that the pressure from LaTourette is irrelevant because “had we known that he had contributed to the opponent of a person he was writing about, we wouldn’t have hired him in the first place.” Except, as Coryell points out, he has donated money to other candidates, but those donations don’t seem to be relevant.
On Wide Open, the online editor is saying, “Our concern was that since Jeff and the other Wide Open bloggers are paid, his views might be taken as those of the paper, which could raise legitimate questions about our fairness.” Which is nonsense, because no one would expect a blog, that features two liberal posters and two conservative ones, to stand for the views of the paper on each individual post. Moreover, the Plain Dealer could have simply put a disclaimer at the top of the blog reading, “The views of this blog do not represent the views of the Cleveland Plain Dealer.”
In the end, the newspaper valued its relationship with a congressman more than it valued one of its employees. Simple as that.
Update: The second liberal blogger on Wide Open has resigned.
