Newspaper Guild: Washington Post Jettisons Core Journalism Principle in Effort to Escape Labor Ruling

WASHINGTON, March 26  /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Journalism is full of secrets. And the Washington Post, one of the nation's most venerated news outlets, makes a living keeping secret the identity of those who help it navigate through the White House, the halls of Congress and layers of bureaucracy.
The Post kept the identity of Deepthroat, of Watergate fame, secret for four decades, and through the years has championed the need for "off-the- record" conversations as essential to the nation's democracy.
But last week, the Post threw those ideals out the window. Facing a pending loss in a pivotal case before the National Labor Relations Board, Washington Post management has filed a last-minute addendum with the Labor Board revealing the contents of off-the-record talks that it had with The Newspaper Guild over a period of more than a year.
The move is a blatant violation of the core journalistic principle that holds a promise of confidentiality as inviolable -- a principle that reporters have gone to jail to defend. The unilateral disclosure is also a breach of the newspaper's legal obligation under federal labor law to bargain in good faith.
As a result, the Newspaper Guild today is filing an Unfair Labor Practice charge against The Post -- the third filed by the Guild against Post management in 12 months. The charges are part of an escalating battle over The Post's refusal to negotiate fair work rules and compensation for the growing number of employees whose jobs have changed significantly with the company's expansion into various new media platforms.
"Unfortunately, The Post has sent a chilling signal that it will violate a confidentiality pledge when it suits the newspaper's business purposes," said Linda Foley, President of The Newspaper Guild. "The Guild will fight to force The Post to honor its promise of confidentiality."
The Guild, which represents about 1,250 Post employees in the newsroom and in various commercial departments, launched the initial Labor Board case in 2006, charging that The Post violated federal labor law by refusing to bargain over the terms of new work assignments relating to Washington Post Radio.
Post officials acknowledged that the talks were held on a strictly "off- the-record" basis, a ground rule agreed to by the Guild at The Post's request. Yet the Guild has learned that The Post has now provided sworn testimony to the Board revealing details of the contents of those talks, as part of an effort to reverse the Labor Board's pending decision.
"The Post, which passionately goes to bat for the right of reporters to keep off-the-record conversations confidential, has unilaterally repudiated that principle in an effort to avoid facing a charge by the federal government," said Robert Paul, a Washington attorney with Zwerdling, Paul, Kahn & Wolly, P.C., who is representing the Guild before the Labor Board. "At The Washington Post, promises of confidentiality apparently stop at the door of labor relations."
Paul emphasized that the Guild has no concerns that the contents of the talks will weaken the Guild's case. But by cavalierly breaking the newspaper's promise of confidentiality -- a promise that The Post had demanded -- Post management has shown a remarkable failure to live by a rule of journalism that it has touted as sacrosanct, not to mention a failure to honor the agreement it had with the Guild.
In a July 7, 2005 editorial, for example, The Post wrote: Commitments of confidentiality by journalists to their sources will have little value if they can be invalidated by waivers obtained by prosecutors or demanded by senior government officials from their subordinates. In such cases, journalists are obligated to protect their sources even if the law is against them."
The editorial called efforts to force a New York Times reporter to reveal her sources "highly questionable" and it applauded the fact that for decades "reporters have been willing to face jail to protect confidential sources ...."
In another editorial, which ran on Oct 15, 2005, The Post again stood up for the principle of keeping off-the-record information secret, applauding a journalist "for refusing now to identify all of her sources, turn over all of her notes and otherwise lay bare her reporting." If off-the-record conversations are to be forced into the open, The Post wrote, "journalism and the public will be the losers."
The new Unfair Labor Practice complaint filed today claims that "The Washington Post has violated its fundamental, statutory obligation to bargain in good faith with the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, Local 32035, by publicly disclosing the terms of settlement discussions that were held between the Guild and the Post, despite an express agreement that these communications would be and would remain confidential, private and off-the-record."
"Post executives, trying to protect an ill-conceived anti-Guild business interest, violated the principle of confidentiality of sources to avoid a federal government charge of refusing to bargain over radio work," said Guild representative Rick Ehrmann.
The Newspaper Guild-CWA