In the post-Watergate era of full disclosure, it has become mandatory for persons in a variety of occupations to disclose financial self-interest that might bear on their decisions. Sometimes full disclosure is compelled by law and sometimes it is a moral mandate, but one way or the other, full disclosure about money interests has become a social imperative.
Candidates for public office must list all their financial contributors. Appointees to public office are regularly required to fill out lengthy forms requiring detailed disclosure of financial, employment, organizational, and even family matters.
Even those who serve without pay on commissions or boards are required to make a general disclosure of possible conflicts of interest, plus specific disclosures when each new agenda item comes onto the table.
The underlying principle is that self-interest is okay, but it must be disclosed so that others can take that self-interest into account when evaluating your work, your votes, your recommendations, your policies, and your comments.
While there are no laws that require members of the media to engage in similar disclosure of financial self-interest, much of the media operates under a self-imposed rule. Many large newspapers forbid their reporters to accept gifts, trips, or even a free meal from organizations sponsoring news events for fear that accepting such favors might secretly influence the reporter to write a friendlier article.
It’s time we realize that money is not the only hidden persuader that can influence the media and cause advocacy or bias in reporting the news. Another is the natural desire for respectability and social acceptance of their views and lifestyles.
In the past year, network television programming and metropolitan newspapers have been preaching in behalf of some new nuances of the sexual liberation advocacy to which we’ve been subjected since the late 1960s. We are told again and again that our traditional-family social structure is changing to one of serial marriages. That means a society in which the norm is for everyone to be married and divorced at least several times.
The Knight-Ridder newspapers recently issued a widely-reprinted news feature called “What shape will marriage take in the 21st century — if it survives at all?” Its principal sales pitch was that experts predict that in the not-too-distant future more people will marry more and for shorter periods of time.
Most of the article was taken up with quoting nobodies, who either were not married at all or had failed at several marriages, griping about marriage and concluding that “until death do us part is on the way out.” The author said that “marriage is no longer a prerequisite for having a family,” and tried to legitimize alternatives to marriage such as artificial insemination of the unmarried. The Knight-Ridder news feature should have disclosed the marital history and lifestyle of the author and editor. ABC-TV’s three-hour documentary called “After the Sexual Revolution” last summer preached this same line about serial marriages. The narrators solemnly told us that, instead of one lifelong marriage, the future will be a merry-go-round of marriage and divorce.
The Wall Street Journal published a similar news story under the headline, “If you see families staging a comeback, it’s probably a mirage.” This pompous newspaper, which advertises itself as “the daily diary of the American dream,” reported the page-one news that departures from traditional family lifestyle are now “75 percent of the norm.”
Time and again, TV viewers have been subjected to bleeding-heart programs about the supposed need for the taxpayers to finance day-care for employed women. These programs are usually narrated by highly paid women who seek to dignify their own lifestyle, namely, pursuing a career while demanding that someone else care for their babies.
Earlier this year, one network aired a primetime television drama about a widow who engaged in a lesbian affair; it was programmed as though this were a normal and frequent occurrence that might happen to any nice-looking widow next door. The script writer of this avant-garde drama, a lesbian, used the primetime airwaves to try to wrap her own lifestyle in a cloak of normalcy and respectability.
Those who seek to bring about social acceptance of non-traditional sexual relationships and non-mother child-care have every right to enjoy freedom of speech and press. But if they want to enjoy the respect of their readers and viewers, they should fully disclose their own self-interest behind their advocacy journalism and TV programming.
