DEFEDE / A politician, a journalist, a suicide and a tape

By Paul Berton

Free Press
Editor-in-Chief

On Wednesday, a Florida politician walked into the lobby of the Miami Herald, left a message for a columnist at the front desk, and then put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

It was a bizarre and traumatic event for those at the newspaper, but its aftermath is creating a buzz in the journalistic community.

Hours after the horrific suicide, the columnist was fired -- for a reason many Canadians might find surprising.

The politician was Arthur E. Teele Jr., a former city commissioner who had been charged with corruption last week. By Wednesday, more stories were breaking about Teele's sexual habits that were likely to embarrass him.

The columnist was Jim DeFede, who had known Teele for years.

The message, according to a security guard: "He said to tell DeFede to tell his wife he loves her."

DeFede's offence was perhaps not as grievous as you might imagine -- he was fired because he taped a telephone interview with Teele earlier that day.

"I thought he might commit suicide," DeFede told reporters. "It was a very tense situation. I was shaking. I wanted to preserve the record. I knew it was an important moment. I rolled the tape on impulse."

Now, in the newsroom of The London Free Press and in many, many other newsrooms across Canada and the United States and indeed the world, many journalists tape their interviews as a matter of course.

In fact, if you are talking with a journalist at The London Free Press about a story, you should assume you're being taped. Not all of us do it, but many do.

In Ontario, that's perfectly legal. The law here states that taping of telephone conversations is fine as long as one of the participants knows about it.

In Florida, however, as in eight other states, the law is different: all participants must know the conversation is being taped.

DeFede didn't tell Teele he was taping the conversation. He told his bosses about the conversation -- and the tape -- after the awful incident in the lobby, and he was fired because he had broken the law.

Some of DeFede's colleagues thought the punishment was too harsh and came too quickly and without enough consideration.

But other journalists agree he should have been fired.

"People have a reasonable expectation to know when they're going to be taped," journalism ethics Professor Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute in Florida told the Herald. "Even if it's legal, it still doesn't mean journalists should tape people without knowledge of the other party."

Many others, including me, disagree.

To be sure, it is a journalist's duty to identify herself or himself to a subject and to make it clear a story is in the works.

Sometimes, if the subject seems naive (eyewitnesses come to mind), journalists should and do take extra precautions to tell them their comments and or names may appear in the newspaper. There will always be those who, for whatever reason, don't know their comments may be made public and we must do more to ensure they understand what it means when they talk to a reporter.

But any politician, public official, business leader, athlete, public personality and many others should know their comments may be on tape.

You'd think they'd want it that way. After all, tape recordings are made to ensure accuracy. Most good reporters take notes and use the recordings only as backup.

Sometimes, if it's a difficult interview and the subject refutes the comments made in the story, reporters use the tape to defend themselves.

Subjects have a right to ask if they're being taped and get an honest answer.

If it's a radio interview, it seems only fair to tell subjects they may be heard on air, but in the newspaper, I'm afraid not.