Jack McElroy: Columnist On Hiatus During Election By Jack McElroy Posted April 27, 2014 at 3 a.m. Readers may have noticed the item earlier this month announcing that Mark Harmon had won a national Sigma Delta Chi award for columns he wrote last year for the News Sentinel. It’s a big award. In fact, it’s the top national prize given for News Sentinel content so far this year. (Our football writer, Evan Woodbery, took a second place in the national Associated Press Sports Editors competition, and our men’s basketball writer, Ben Frederickson, won a first-place award, but that was for work he did for the Casper (Wyo.) Star-Tribune before we hired him away.) So why isn’t Harmon’s column in the News Sentinel this year? Well, he’s now running for the Tennessee Democratic Party State Executive Committee, and his incumbent opponent, former state Sen. Bill Owen, questioned the fairness of giving a bully pulpit to one candidate but not another. In the past, we’ve terminated columns if the writers became candidates for public office. There’s an obvious conflict of interest. In this case, though, the conflict wasn’t immediately apparent. Harmon already was writing from the perspective of a well-known Democrat, and the election wasn’t going to affect that status. We certainly wouldn’t have paid him as a regular columnist if he were still on the Knox County Commission because that would have conflicted with our role as government watchdog. But a party office, with no control of government funds or functions, didn’t seem to create the same issue. Still, Owen argued that the Democratic Executive Committee spot will appear on the election ballot, and he had a point. We don’t want to give any candidate an unfair edge with the electorate. Owen, by the way, authored a guest column for us early this year on Medicaid expansion. The stone he chucked at Harmon didn’t come from an entirely blameless position, either. He has his own media gig, a radio show on WJBE, the station owned by state Rep. Joe Armstrong. But we can’t make our decisions based on what other media outlets do. We go by our own standards, so we’ve put Harmon’s column on hiatus through the August election. It’s not uncommon, by the way, for politicians to feel inspired to write guest columns when elections are looming. A few months ago, one incumbent wanted to submit a column about Thanksgiving just as a challenger emerged in his race. The content, he insisted, would be non-political. I have no doubt that would be the true, but publicly expressing his gratitude for America’s blessings wouldn’t have hurt his re-election plans, either. We have made exceptions if a column’s contribution to public discourse clearly outweighed political considerations. For example, this year we accepted a submission from state Rep. Mike Carter about a bill on annexation before the Legislature even though he is in a contested race for re-election. We felt the commentary was timely and would be valuable to readers, while the political benefit of the column would be insignificant, given that Carter’s district is in Hamilton County, well outside our circulation area.
Posted on: Mon, 28 Apr 2014 06:12:13 +0000
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