Some industry observers, however, such as Keith Woods, who teaches ethics at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., believe the stock restrictions are too harsh. "It's like asking a reporter not to vote," he told E&P. Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, said such limits mean "everyone has to become a monk."
For one thing, the stock ownership thing would ban people like me from doing my job. It's not because I'm a huge Wall Street wheeler and dealer. I just happen to have a Roth IRA invested in a mutual fund, which includes dozens of companies in every industry imaginable. So now I've got to sell off a good chunk of my retirement just to remain "objective"? Ridiculous.
Meanwhile, Mickey Kaus rips the Times' policy in a must-read piece. Choice cuts:
What's deeply annoying about Raines and his henchperson Gerald Boyd isn't their liberalism, or their bias, but their insistent pretense that what they are doing isn't liberal or biased but just straightforward objective newspapering the way the Times has always done it. ("Call it journalism.") They're selling their product dishonestly, sneakily trying to trade on the credibility earned in an earlier, different time. The truth would set them free. There's nothing wrong with being a crusading liberal newspaper, after all.
With regards to the proposed policy, Kaus has this:
Will this fool anyone? That would seem to be the idea. As Michael Kinsley has noted, such rules ban only the appearance of bias, not the actuality of bias. NYT Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse marched in a big pro-Roe, pro-choice demonstration a few years back. Does anybody think she's changed her mind since? Will they think she's changed her mind if she now refrains from marching?
This reminds me of an interview with Raines I saw several months ago where he claimed that he wasn't politically biased because when it comes to voting, he's a registered independent.
Pffft.
