I resigned because of the journalism, not the politics

Years ago,  an Arizona newspaper editor asked me to insert a few paragraphs about the Keating Five  scandal into a story about John McCain.  The Arizona senator, who died in 2018,  had been criticized by the Senate Ethics Committee a few years earlier for showing “poor judgment” by intervening with federal banking regulators on behalf of savings-and-loan executive Charles Keating Jr., a major campaign donor.

I politely declined to do the insert. It wasn’t because I was trying to protect McCain. Rather, it was my judgment that the Keating reference didn’t fit contextually in this particular story. It looked more like a swipe than a missing puzzle piece.

This is standard stuff,  the sort of call you make all the time in daily journalism. At The Baltimore Sun, my former employer, I felt like it was happening all too frequently  after the 2024 ownership change–- angles, paragraphs, headlines, entire stories, that seemed gratuitous or forced.

If you see the same pattern over and over,  you begin to ask yourself:  If there's no persuasive journalistic reason for these choices, then is there an ideological one?

In the many social media posts since my resignation, some commenters have assumed my resignation was driven by the political leanings they associate with The Sun's ownership and its ties to Sinclair.

The targets of the journalism that concerned me were almost always Democrats, particularly Gov. Wes Moore.

But I left because of the journalism, not the politics.

We live in a highly partisan world, and I understand why many people see almost every decision through a red-versus-blue lens.

Naturally, I have political beliefs. But my role, and the role of many journalist friends, is to report objectively and responsibly enough that readers can trust us.

Any journalistic success I’ve had is because I’ve developed sources — Democrats and Republicans – who trust me to fairly and accurately report information they provide, and in the proper context. That’s  often how you get the most consequential stories.

My credibility is precious.  In a sense, it’s all I have.  It could all  go away if I write irresponsibly  or am associated with a publication people don’t know whether to  trust.

In my world, it  matters far less who owns the newspaper than whether  there is a solid line between reporting and editorializing –- a divide journalists used to call “church and state.”

Opinion writers can be immensely valuable. But my job -– my calling, my livelihood -– is reporting and analysis.

My Substack pieces will be uninhibited versions of a column I wrote for The Sun that included politics and sports. My topics included everything from “Why is Michael Steele still a Republican?” to “How will Waymo navigate snow and ice?” to nuggets from an interview I did with Nancy Pelosi, whose father had helped bring the Colts to Baltimore.

Postscript:

I’ve talked in generalities about why I left The Sun. But it’s always better in journalism to be specific rather than vague. So for commenters who questioned why I’ve been telling rather than showing, my response is: You’re right.  

This isn’t personal. I still have friends at my former employer whom I root for, and I have other things I’d like to write about.

I once taught journalism as an adjunct professor, and I’ll do this in a future column as if we’re in class.  I'll present the underlying facts alongside a few published stories so you can decide for yourself whether the journalism was fair.