{"id":1390,"date":"2006-06-06T23:46:49","date_gmt":"2006-06-06T23:46:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/06\/conflict-of-interest.html"},"modified":"2006-06-06T23:46:49","modified_gmt":"2006-06-06T23:46:49","slug":"conflict-of-interest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/06\/conflict-of-interest.html","title":{"rendered":"Conflict of Interest?"},"content":{"rendered":"

An interesting inside-baseball journalism story with a Catholic angle:<\/a><\/p>\n

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G. Jefferson Price wrote for the Baltimore Sun <\/em>for decades before he left in 2004. Upon his leaving, he entered into a relationship with Catholic News Service, in which he would travel to various CRS projects and write about them. These articles would be used in any number of places including the Sun:<\/em><\/p>\n

After taking a buyout in June 2004, the former foreign editor and correspondent had been writing opinion pieces for The Sun<\/em> under a pair of yearly freelance contracts. Since January 2005, he\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Under his most recent contract, The Sun<\/em> has been paying Price $100 per column. CRS has been footing the considerably more expensive bills of Price\u2019s travels to many of the world\u2019s most dangerous and distressed locations\u2014Uganda, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Haiti, among others\u2014enabling him to report his observations and opinions in a newspaper with a proud heritage of foreign correspondence, but one in which exotic datelines from local reporters are increasingly scarce. <\/p>\n

In exchange for CRS\u2019s contribution to Price\u2019s journalism (it also pays him a consulting per diem while traveling) the Catholic aid agency got to dictate where Price would go, with whom he would travel, and, at least to some degree, what he would write about. <\/p>\n

And what Catholic Relief Services wanted Price to write about was Catholic Relief Services.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole purpose of bringing Jeff on board was to help increase the awareness within the U.S. media about Catholic Relief Services and our work overseas,\u201d explains Elizabeth Griffin, CRS\u2019s communications director.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The conflict arose a few weeks ago because the Sun’s <\/em>editorial page editor claims she just discovered that he was writing about CRS projects, without explicitly naming them as such. Price claims that the understanding he had with the Sun<\/em> was that he could write about CRS, but not name them as CRS projects. <\/p>\n

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Price says he has no misgivings about the CRS-related stories he wrote for The Sun<\/em> or any other paper. \u201cI would not do anything differently,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was important and still is important for me to maintain a reputation for integrity, so I would not write puff pieces for Catholic Relief Services . . . and that\u2019s not what they wanted me to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

He intends to continue traveling with CRS and pitching newspapers with the stories he finds on his journeys. \u201cWhat I do is write stories about people living on the darkest side of the earth,\u201d he says, a day before leaving for East Timor on another CRS assignment. \u201cIt\u2019s not as if I\u2019m a lobbyist for some bad organization, for God\u2019s sake.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Thanks to Nancy Nall for passing it along.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An interesting inside-baseball journalism story with a Catholic angle: G. Jefferson Price wrote for the Baltimore Sun for decades before he left in 2004. Upon his leaving, he entered into a relationship with Catholic News Service, in which he would travel to various CRS projects and write about them. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. 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