Several leading political journalists are striving to avoid apparent conflicts of interest due to their close relationship with presidential campaign workers – very close.
"Some of America’s most prominent political journalists are, quite literally, wedded to the 2008 presidential race: Their spouses work for one of the candidates,” the Los Angeles Times reports.
Among the Washington, D.C. pairings:
At the L.A. Times, political reporter Ronald Brownstein was banned from writing news stories about the presidential campaigns because his wife Eileen McMenamin is chief spokeswoman for Sen. John McCain. Brownstein will instead write for the newspaper’s opinion and editorial pages.
Fortune magazine Washington bureau chief Nina Easton’s husband Russ Schriefer is plotting strategy for the McCain campaign. Easton said she won’t write stories about McCain, and will issue occasional disclaimers when she appears as a Fox News analyst.
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Dan Senor, a former White House aide, spurned an offer to join Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign so his wife, NBC’s Campbell Brown, can continue to cover politics.
Matthew Cooper, a former Time magazine correspondent, said he will continue to write about Hillary Clinton’s campaign even though his wife, Mandy Grunwald, is a chief ad strategist for Clinton. But he plans "to acknowledge my wife works for Hillary.”
Such a disclosure is not enough to satisfy Tom Rosenstiel, a former Washington correspondent for Newsweek who is now director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
"You have the right to marry anyone you want,” he told the Times, "but you don’t have the right to cover any beat you want.”
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