T-D suspends Hardy.

Posted byWaldo Jaquith 10 Comments on T-D suspends Hardy.

Style Weekly: The Richmond Times-Dispatch has suspended veteran political reporter Michael Hardy without pay for giving $1k to a Democrat running for U.S. Senate in Rhode Island. The paper’s guidelines of conduct for reporters say that they mustn’t contribute to campaigns. I’m not sure how I feel about this.

Published by Waldo Jaquith

Waldo Jaquith (JAKE-with) is an open government technologist who lives near Char­lottes­­ville, VA, USA. more »

10 replies on “T-D suspends Hardy.”

  1. Me, either, but seems like a basic case of if there’s a rule about something where you work and you don’t follow it (assuming you actually knew about it and the employer made enough of an effort to make sure you knew about it) then it’s the employers call. Appearance of impartiality and all that.

    Great use of the word “mustn’t”, though – looks super-funny but it’s gotta be right …

  2. I was all ready to at least feel bad for the guy, but…

    Union president and City Hall reporter Michael Martz says that in a recent meeting, Hardy told Bellows and Human Resources Director Ron Carey that he did not know the candidate and contributed at the suggestion of his wife, Eva Tieg Hardy, a well-known lobbyist for Dominion Virginia Power.

    …not so much.

  3. I can understand suspending Mastropaolo for giving money away in her own backyard, but Hardy donated outside of his coverage area. Unfortunate move on the TD’s part, but if that’s their policy…

  5. That was going to be my point: At what point do reporters give up their right of free political speech, as in contributions?

    When they donate to someone they are actively covering.

    I think this is a bad move. Hardy should be allowed to donate, but only in areas he is not covering for the newspaper (geographic areas).

    The fact that TD uses this to suspend him begs the question, do they routinely check to see if employees have been giving money to someone? Or did someone tell them? Or did Hardy tell them himself?

  6. That being said, if he doesn’t even know the candidate, but donates on suggestion, is this like getting a horse-racing tip?

    Sorry for the poor reading comprehension in missing the above referenced discussion with Hardy, et al.

  7. I really have to wonder – would they have suspended him if the candidate had been a Republican? Somehow I don’t think so.

    And I also remember an article somewhere in the past about how bad the TD really was to work at, and how overly adversarial management was toward their reporters. This is most likely just some really nasty office politics creeping out into the public arena.

    Out of coverage area or in coverage area, it shouldn’t matter. A reporter will probably favor whomever it is he likes anyway. Everyone writes from their own personal viewpoint no matter how neutral one tries to be and that viewpoint is going to have an affect on the story. I think if he’s writing a story about someone to whose campaign he donated all that should be required is a caveat warning (like Waldo puts in his posts) “here’s the story but you should know I gave this guy a political donation.”

  8. What’s the point of disallowing political contributions? Is it so the paper can pretend their reporters have no political bias?

  9. That’s a pretty interesting point, Jon. If anything, allowing their reporters to make contributions provides a metric by which readers can measure the political preferences of their employees. I think there’s a lot to be said for the British approach (which I gather is the approach in the rest of the world), in which a paper wears its political biases on its sleeve, rather than doing its best to stifle those biases, letting it slip out only on the editorial page.

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