The Root.com
The organization’s board of directors decided Friday against the travel after potential ethical issues came to light.
BY: RICHARD PRINCE
Bob Butler, president of the National Association of Black Journalists, with officers Corey Dade and Dedrick A. Russell
LEE IVORY
Board Decides Against Trip Because of Ethical Issues
The board of directors of the National Association of Black Journalists decided Friday to turn down $25,000 in free travel from the state airline of Morocco after the trade association of black-newspaper publishers was criticized for accepting an expense-paid visit to the North African country last week.
NABJ had struck a deal with Morocco for $35,000 in sponsorships for the black journalists’ Hall of Fame Induction ceremony, held at the Newseum in Washington on Thursday. Of that, $10,000 was to be in cash and $25,000 in travel vouchers good for any of 26 cities where Royal Air Maroc flies.
However, that agreement took place before the expense-paid trip by the National Newspaper Publishers Association came to light. Leading mainstream news organizations forbid employees from accepting free travel from news sources or governments, but NNPA does not subscribe to those rules.
Most NABJ members work in the mainstream news media. “The way I kind of see NABJ, we would be the role models . . . the policy enforcers for black people in this business,” Lee Ivory, who spent 24 years at USA Today, including as publisher of its sports weekly, told fellow board members. “We should be beyond reproach.”
Keith Reed, the organization’s treasurer and senior editor at ESPN, questioned whether NABJ should make such decisions for its members, many of whom work for organizations that have their own ethics policies. “We are the governors of NABJ. We are not the ethical stewards of the members of the organization,” Reed said.
Herbert Lowe, a former NABJ president who now teaches at Marquette University, told the group, “If you have to spend that much time on whether this is an ethical question, it is an ethical question. Ten thousand dollars is not worth the negative publicity.”
Lowe said that the most significant story for black journalists in recent days was the promotion of Rob King to head news operations at ESPN, but it was subordinated in Journal-isms to news that the U.N. envoy from Western Sahara, a colony of Morocco, accused the country of using its expenses-paid trip for the black press as a political weapon against those in Western Sahara.
Some board members cautioned against such foreign entanglements, especially without doing “due diligence.” “We are American citizens,” Cindy George, a reporter for the Houston Chronicle and NABJ parliamentarian, said. “We live here. We have dealings with American companies. If this were North Korea, if this were China, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. The NNPA trip raised some concerns about human rights issues.”
NABJ President Bob Butler, who brought the issue to the board, said he saw ethical hypocrisy by some mainstream organizations that allow staffers to test drive automobiles and use new technological gadgets free of charge. Others said journalists of color were under more scrutiny on such issues than others.
Maurice Foster, the NABJ executive director, said he negotiated with a Morocco representative after Butler asked him to see whether NABJ could restore funding for the Ethel Payne Fellowships, under which journalists researched projects in Africa and reported on them.
Members discussed ways to accept the Morocco tickets under the guise of fellowships, but decided that those would be subterfuges.
In the end, Butler said that the organization would accept an offer of a discount on the travel — he said it would be 5 percent or 10 percent — but that “we just want to tell them we just can’t take the tickets.” The board members agreed by consensus.
The National Bar Association, another black organization, is scheduled to leave Saturday for Morocco, as about 130 members, paying their own way, stage their annual midwinter meeting.
In other business, Foster told the board, meeting at its headquarters at the University of Maryland in College Park, that the association had 3,117 members in December, of whom 1,317 were full members, 611 associate members such as faculty members or public relations professionals, 1,061 were in the student category and 62 were high-school members. A few were in other categories. NABJ is the nation’s largest organization of journalists of color.
Foster also said the summer convention near Orlando, Fla., netted $940,000.
