May 18th, 2009 
Journo In journalism school one of the very first things you learn is to not report on things you have a connection with. You don’t write about your friends, relatives or loved ones (there are special exceptions here), companies you work for or clubs you participate in etc. This includes companies your spouse is involved in. And of course this makes sense. Who could possibly be objective with something they have a financial or emotional stake in?
When I heard last week the wife of ESPN’s David Newton got the account to do the marketing, licensing and PR for Dale Earnhardt Inc‘s legacy business (his wife Debby Robinson runs Victory Management Group) I thought that would be the end of David’s reporting on DEI. I was wrong.
Just a few days later I was horrified to see him writing about DEI. He didn’t make one single mention of his blatant connection to the company. Instead he went on to write a 1,300 word puff piece about DEI.
My stomach was churning.
I don’t know a single editor that would have given him the OK to run with this story. In very rare circumstances it is acceptable to write or report on something you have a connection with (this shouldn’t have been one of those). If that occurs you need to disclose that connection in the story so there is complete transparency with the reader. NBC and MSNBC do this whenever they report on anything to do with parent company General Electric.
Ultimately the preferable thing to do is to remove yourself from covering anything related to that person, company or group. Andrea Mitchell, of NBC News, who is married to former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan never reported on her husband or the Federal Reserve Bank. It would have been inappropriate given her relationship.
These very simple, common sense things are taught in school and in any newsroom you’ll ever work in. In fact many editors will set up guidelines early on with reporters.
At the end of the day, as a journalist you have one thing: your integrity. When that’s gone people will no longer trust you and your ability to report effectively will be severely diminished.
I can’t say I have always agreed with David Newton. But I thought a little more of him than this. He of all people knows better. With 25+ years of journalism experience he lost his amateur status a long time ago.
To say I’m disappointed is an understatement.
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There’s one thing I’m going to disagree with you. An ethical lapse is fawning over a childhood idol when you get the chance to interview them for an article you’re writing and can’t get the questions out without looking like a dumbstruck fan.
This sounds like a full-blown conflict of interest. I’m surprised he hasn’t been shown the door yet. Last person I knew who did something like that didn’t make it through the Editorial meeting the day after it was discovered, Security escorted him out of the building before he could finish collection his stuff.
What is the difference between this and say….Marty Smith being close friends and frequent partier with with Jimmie Johnson and all the coverage he does of Jimmie? And Rusty Wallace being a commentator during races his son is in? Or Darrell Waltrip and his coverage of (and butt kissing and never finding fault with) Michael during the Cup races? I didn’t see anything in the piece that Newton wrote that was over the top. It wasn’t anything different than if Marty Smith or any of the other NASCAR media would have written…using quotes from the actual people involved. I don’t like David Newton any more than the next person but there are “conflicts of interest” all over the sport of NASCAR and I don’t see anyone whining and complaining about those, so perhaps it’s more the fact that you hate that someone is writing a “puff piece” on DEI and you are more on the side of “It’s all Teresa’s fault” in the Jr/Teresa battle.
It’s simple for me. I have never taken David Newton seriously, so nothing surprises me.
I never knew Andrea Mitchell was married to Alan Greenspan. A good question for trivia night.
Kate: There are obviously going to end up being personal relationships to some degree between the reporters and people in the sport. We spend entirely way too much time together for things like that not to happen. But Newton’s wife being in charge of DEI’s PR is a little different then Marty Smith being friends with Jimmie Johnson. If Marty writes something bad about Jimmie, he doesn’t have to go home and sleep next to him.
Second, there are certainly other serious conflicts of interest in the sport, but the relationships between people like the Waltrips and Rusty Wallace’s team ownership are public knowledge. You know when you turn on ESPN’s coverage that Rusty owns the team his son drives for. He doesn’t hide that fact. David Newton is writing pieces on DEI and pushing them as objective, when in reality they aren’t. And he isn’t letting his readers know that. That’s wrong.
And the fact that the team involved just happens to be DEI has no bearing on this situation. It could have been Hendrick, Gibbs, Roush, or any other team for that matter. We would have reacted the same. Don’t skew the facts of this post to make it seem like the Dale Jr./Teresa situation means anything here.
Why is this such a huge surprise? These types of things are the exact reason why more and more people turn to blogs instead of traditional media outlets. Of course this is a conflict of interest. Had Newton NOT written a piece on DEI, or for that matter ever again, it wouldn’t be a problem. Everyone knows about Rusty, and everyone knows about Waltrip. The difference is that people didn’t know about his connection to DEI, so there is a breakdown in trust. Readers want to know that they can trust the information they are reading. When they find out they can’t they get angry. Over and over again. And that’s why having TNI is so important. Good Work guys.
Newton sucks and DEI sucks nothing more to say.
Wow! That’s one of the first rules I learned as a Journalism major in college. This guy has no journalistic integrity whatsoever, pathetic!
With the close nit aspect of the sport, of course your going to be reporting on friends and people you socialize with out side of work.
However!!! When you are the PR hack for the company, it is absolutely unconscionable to “report” on that company.
He should be ashamed, but then again… he works for ESPN, so its the norm in their coverage. Evernham, Wallace, Daugherty, and so on are all car owners, representing that they have a unbiased opinion…. Yeah ok sure.
this is nothing new, ESPN has a complete lack of ethics all around. they have this, plus ray evernham reporting on NASCAR now and occasionally talking about GEM when he was still working for them… they have brad dougherty (sp?) in the booth during races while he owns a stake of a team… a lot of “journalists” reporting on stuff they have financial interests in.
not only that, but ESPN has been CONSTANTLY cutting in from commercial break lately saying “BRETT FAVRE WILL PLAY THIS SEASON!” it’s every day! literally every day i turn on ESPN, they have some new “breaking news” about brett favre, and by the time it airs, it’s been discounted by everyone and it’s not even news. they constantly report on rumors as is they are fact. it’s not exclusive to ESPN, it’s more predominant in the 24 hour news networks that have a lot of space to fill. tune in at any hour of the day and the commonly heard phrase will be “we don’t have any information as to what we are looking at right now but we presume it to be…” yadda yadda yadda. it’s insane! NO ONE knows how to be a journalist in this day and age.
For those of you acting like this is business as usual–as TC said, Rusty et al are pretty much all ‘disclosed’…meaning, we already know the relationships they have. THIS one involved a business, ie, money, and would not be known by the general public. Journo’s analogy of NBC/GE is a good one, our local T-W news channel always mentions ‘Time warner is the parent company’ etc. if they do a T-W story. Same deal. Another concern I have about the TV personalities, though, are the ‘personal service’ contracts they have with sponsors. I wonder how many of those there are…that we know nothing about.
Well, since I tend not to read anything written about DEI, I can’t say that this matters much to me.
Where in the “puff piece” as you put it (thus infering that it’s not really a hard hitting “news” piece to begin with) was there anything of an opinionated nature that might infer that the fact that his wife does PR for the company, might have influenced the piece? He used direct quotes from those involved to base his story on….it wasn’t an editorial piece extolling the wonderful virtues of a company. It was basically just repeating what mostly Jeffrey said about DEI hoping to return to it’s former glory. Something that anyone else taking those same quotes might have written.
BTW…how many people knew that Steve Byrnes wife at one time owned a marketing and PR firm that handled corporations that had NASCAR sponsorships and also handled the PR for several Busch and Craftsman Truck teams. Once her firm was purchased by IMG, she still worked for IMG as the “Director of NASCAR Racing” for IMG. I doubt that was ever really divulged, and noone questioned Steve’s intentions on reporting.
And when was the last time that Marty wrote something bad about Jimmie? In fact, I believe he’s the biggest Hendrick suck up there is….except to maybe Jr….
Journo, SUPER piece. If you had not done this I doubt I would ever have seen it. It seems to me that the issue is full disclosure so the reader of the article can make an informed evaluation – and obviously there was no disclosure in the EESPN article when I read it. Keep up the good work. Thank you.
Kate- The fact that the team involved in this story is DEI has nothing to do with my issue. It wouldn’t matter, as TC said earlier, if she worked for Gibbs or Ganassi. That part is really irrelevant.
As far as the story goes, I hate to tell you but that is what a puff piece looks like. But again irrelevant. And no he didn’t need to write an editorial. It wasn’t what he wrote, it was that he wrote it. Reporters routinely get fired from news organizations for doing things like this. It is unethical and wrong.
As far as having relationships with drivers, I would say to you that that is unavoidable. You spend 38 weekends a year with a group of people and try to not become friendly with them. It is necessary to get people to talk to you. But as TC said above there is a big difference between being friends with someone and sleeping next to them. It will make you think.
I am well aware of Steve Byrne’s wifes former employ and I would say the exact same thing in that situation that I am saying here. You should not report on things you have a financial connection to.
David Newton now has a financial connection to DEI. Whether it is big or not that is going to make him think about what he writes and his readers should know that.
so, can we safely assume “Journo” isn’t David Newton?
Thank you for breaking this story. I did read the Newton/DEI article and thought it was not objective in any manner; actually felt uncomfortable as I reading read. It truly felt like a PR article. Now I know. You rock!
I had always always learned that you don’t report on those things that you have a connection with personal or otherwise so it used to bother me when those in motorsports media covered stories in which they had either a personal or business relationship with those they were covering. Then I realized that as compared to most other sports where the journalists don’t develop relationships with those that they’re covering to maintain their objectivity, virtually every single member of the motorsports media has some sort of relationship with some of those that they cover that could lead to a bias in the way they report the stories. I think it’s okay when it’s DW talking about Michael or Rusty talking about his son because those are obvious relationships that are well known but how many people know when they read something that Marty Smith writes about Jimmie Johnson that they’re close friends? And I often wonder how many other personal or business relationships there are between media members and drivers/teams/sponsors that I don’t know about and how that might effect what they write.
Like you said, it was a puff piece. Should a disclosure have been printed in teeny little letters on the bottom? Sure, but it’s not going to affect anything, you know? CNBC discloses because people make investments based on what they say. They do full disclosure on analysts, their firms, their family, etc. because people are going to rely, possibly detrimentally, on the information being disseminated by these people.
On ESPN.com? Not so much So, while it should have been disclosed, it wasn’t, but it doesn’t hurt anyone. At least it was his original words.
How much worse is it than reporters who take pre-race PR pieces from teams, borrow the quotes from the drivers, and make it look like they did the work to write an article, when all it was, in reality, was a cut and paste job with no credit to the team’s PR people. Sometimes they use a good portion of the original language in the release along with the obligatory quotes – which at least are credited to the drivers.
To me, that’s more unethical than this – we always learned that plagiarism isn’t a good thing.
Ellen- I wasn’t talking about CNBC and their disclosure that their advice shouldn’t be taken as concrete is more a legal issue than one of ethics. Like their counterparts though they too disclose their link with General Electric.
Ultimately it does not matter if people are affected. It is unethical. Plain and simple.
Look everyone is trying to point to these other things and say well why don’t you think this or that is ethical? Well I am not making an argument for those things. Most of the things you are pointing out are things I think are unethical. I don’t think members of the media should use made up quotes from PR people.
The purpose of this post was to point out something we saw as wrong. I think David Newton’s readers deserve to know he has a conflict of interest at DEI. I don’t think I am the one that should be telling you though.
I feel like many of you are trying to justify this by saying other people are doing unethical things so it’s OK. Well it’s not. It’s like committing a crime and then going before a judge and saying “well other people have done it before and other people are doing much worse things, so everything is fine.” Again it is not.
CVT- Maybe I am David Newton and I am just trying to throw people off.
So what connection do you have or not have to DEI, journo? You say you have family throughout the industry, but you have no skins in the game? Being anonymous must have its priveleges.
The Guardian: What does Journo’s connection to any race team have to do with David Newton? We discovered something important we thought people should know, and would want to know. It isn’t right what Newton is doing, and his readers should be aware.
As we’ve said numerous times, everyone has connections through friends and family throughout the sport. The issue though isn’t whether you have those connections or not, its how you deal with them. There are plenty of other writers at ESPN, Newton didn’t have to cover that story. And even if he was the only one, all it would have taken was a simple statement from him stating his connection. That happens, and we are never talking about this.
If you don’t like the fact that we write anonymously, there are plenty of other websites on the web that cover NASCAR. Our anonymity offers us the ability to provide our readers with inside info and opinion that nobody else offers. And I guess that means sometimes we are going to write stuff that some people may not like. Sorry.
The Guardian – What do my connections with DEI have to do with anything? This has nothing to do with DEI as I have said in two separate comment responses. Please read them next time.
Everyone has connections with teams. As I have said two other times it is impossible to not have those connections. And at the end of the day who is to say I don’t remove myself from reporting on things I have connections with.
People want inside information and sometimes it’s not pretty. I get that you might not always like what we write. Our anonymity in this situation or in any other allows us to give you information that you don’t get other places. If you don’t like the way we conduct our site please feel free to look elsewhere.
Journo commented:
“David Newton now has a financial connection to DEI. Whether it is big or not that is going to make him think about what he writes and his readers should know that.”
So is this in essence free advertising for DEI on a major sports outlet in the form of a puff article?
Many people seem to be commenting “big deal, who cares, so what, it’s not really hurting any one.” but they’re missing the point. Ethics. Probably the most important quality a journalist can possess. It’s not about what David Newton wrote about, I agree, big deal, it doesn’t affect me. It’s about David Newton’s principles. He does know that what he did is considered major league unethical in his field & he did it any way. Others commented that a person learns that this is a huge no no in Journalism 101.
I have had clients that have wanted me to do work for them & knowingly misrepresent information. These misrepresentations were “no big deal” & wouldn’t be caught by the system. It wouldn’t really hurt anyone if I filed their case. I could have easily overlooked these misrepresentations & played dumb, done their work & collect my fees but guess what? That’s not how our office rolls & that’s not how we do business because it’s unethical.
What David Newton did is not right. He has demonstrated that he has no principles. That’s the point of this blog.
I have to sign “no payola or plugola” contracts every year. I am not allowed to promote anything in exchange for gifts, tickets, etc. Perhaps ESPN should include an addendum for David Newton to include “sexual favors” in his. Haha!!
Everyone seems to be forgetting that it was an actual event being held at DEI that was being covered, Dale’s Birthday along with the unveiling of the car. Its not like he is just randomly out of the blue writing an article on DEI. He merely covered an event that I assume many other news outlets covered using probably most of the same exact quotes from people at the event (Kerry, Jeffrey, etc..). I really do not see what the big deal is.
Sarah: The content of the piece is insignificant. And so is the fact that he was writing about DEI specifically. If you want, replace DEI with Team X. The problem is that he has a connection to Team X and should not be writing about it, period. It doesn’t matter what the nature of the content is.
Don’t let the fact that the content wasn’t earth shattering, or the fact that it was about DEI affect your thinking. There is a serious conflict of interests here, and that is the bottom line.
I really don’t understand why it is so difficult for people to see what is wrong here. Conflict of interest is not a difficult concept. Ethics in journalism is not a mind-blowing topic. It’s, in this case, a very straight forward & black and white issue.
This is from The society of Professional Journalists website: http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp
By not disclosing his wife’s position at DEI, which is not common public knowledge, I am assuming that Newton has violated all of the following regardless of the content of the article:
Act Independently
Journalists should be free of obligation to any interest other than the public’s right to know.
Journalists should:
—Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.
— Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.
— Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and shun secondary employment, political involvement, public office and service in community organizations if they compromise journalistic integrity.
— Disclose unavoidable conflicts.
— Be vigilant and courageous about holding those with power accountable.
— Deny favored treatment to advertisers and special interests and resist their pressure to influence news coverage.
— Be wary of sources offering information for favors or money; avoid bidding for news.
Windowlicker – Thanks for pulling that. I am having a hard time seeing why people can’t see the conflict too. These really are not difficult concepts.
Ross – I laughed out loud when I read your comment.
I agree Journo…you shouldn’t “you know what” where you eat.
Let’s face it. Those that are not seeing the problem here are the same people that would do this kind of thing. It’s sad how this business, and the world in general, works sometimes.
I wonder, though, if Miss Robinson was feeling any pressure from DEI to exploit her husband. I could see higher ups encouraging her to do this. The people that run that company aren’t journalists, but they know as good as anyone how to get free publicity and use these outlets for their benefit. That would put him in a pretty tight spot, I imagine. Just trying to see this from another angle.
All I can say is wow! I find it funny how you talk about ethics, journalism etc, When you hide behind a blog. How do we know what your background? Did you work for DEI and have issues with the place? Did you work for Evernham? did you do Radio for MRN? Where are you conflicts in this industry? Before you go and be critical of others take a look at yourself and make sure all your ducks are in a row.
If you are going to tell everyone’s business maybe we should know who you are so you can be accountable for the garbage you write. Talk about transparency, practice what you preach bro!
Kettle – Wow kind of hypocritical don’t you think? Attacking me for remaining anonymous and you not using your real name. If your name is really just Kettle though I do apologize.
First of all my contacts with teams have nothing to do with this post in particular and not in any other. If you would have read my other comments or the post for that matter you would have realized that. I don’t think I have grinded an ax with a single post I have written on this blog. Go read them if you like.
I think I was very fair in this situation (and in every situation). He has a massive conflict of interest and I think it is important for his readers to know that. If you don’t like it fine. This is something he has a responsibility to tell his readers about and he did not do that. If you don’t have an issue with that keep reading him. I don’t care. But by doing what he did, he made his business everyone’s business.
This blog and my day job are two very different beasts. That being said I have never compromised my ethics. So BRO I do practice what I preach. If you don’t believe me, that is your problem.
Remaining anonymous is by no means unethical. Trust me I have taken plenty of ethics classes. Our anonymity on here is so we can talk about issues and situations that otherwise might put us in bad sitations. It also allows us to pass on information we hear from people without scaring them away. We are doing this for the entertainment and enlightenment of people like you. If you don’t like that, please don’t waste your time reading it.
If you have any further issues please feel free to email me.
Super blog – especially since you guys address issues that the regular media will not, and in most all cases with that unfortunately unusual thing called objectivity in my opinion.
Since this blog is anonymous I feel that I am on notice that there might be a conflict from time to time and can evaluate what I read here accordingly. If Newton had disclosed his wife’s connection to DEI then I would have no problem with his writing about DEI since then I would have been on notice that his view might have been slanted.
No amount of NASCAR-related incest or conflict of interest suprises me in the least. There has been huge suck-up journalism and paternalism in this sport for decades.
One of the reasons for David Poole’s popularity, and to some degree, Dale, Sr.’s, was their spataneity and objectivity.
Too many in the sport have become so addicted to $$, and so many have acquired wealth beyond any dreams, that certain levels of ethics and integrity have become passee……..only a few retain the things a David Poole held dear.