Over at TVNewser, questions are being raised about a recent CBS interview with Lynne Cheney, based on the fact that the reporter who did the interview, Rita Braver, is married to D.C. attorney Bob Barnett, who handles the Second Lady’s book deals. Braver disclosed the relationship to viewers right away, so CBS doesn’t see any problem, but NYT reporter Jacques Steinberg notes that there’s no shortage of objections, both from other journalists and the blogosphere.
Speaking of the Times, though, an eagle-eyed reader raised a similar red flag concerning last week’s profile of Shalom Auslander, in which Charles McGrath never mentions Riverhead, the publisher of Foreskin’s Lament, which means that he never mentions the fact that the imprint’s executive editor, Sarah McGrath, is his daughter. Which I know is the sort of thing that would catch the Times‘s eye, since Steinberg wrote about a similar incident involving Bob Novak just a little over three years ago. Not that I’m suggesting Auslander’s memoir isn’t compelling enough to have landed in the Times on its own literary strengths, or that it’s all that surprising McGrath would admire the book, however he heard about it—and it’s worth noting in that context that Auslander is one of Geoff Kloske‘s authors, not Sarah McGrath’s. But if the Times considers such networks of media connectivity newsworthy, their own relationships should be laid equally bare.
(Then again, there’s another important distinction to be made: When Bob Barnett’s wife interviews his client on the television network owned by the same conglomerate that owns the publisher who puts out his client’s book, that’s a very different situation from Charles McGrath, working for one company, writing about a book published by another company where his daughter works. The McGraths may suffer from a perceived journalistic conflict of interest, but Barnett, Braver, & Viacom also have to contend with the perception of overlapping financial interests which appear much less ambiguous. Imagine, if you will, that all this hoopla was over an interview with a conservative HarperCollins author on Fox News; the usual liberal suspects would be all over the alleged monopolistic media abuse.)