Fear not, media ethicists: When columnist David Brooks enjoyed two bottles of champagne on a ritzy assignment for T Magazine, he wasn’t being courted by the subject of the story.
That’s according to New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan, who says The Times picked up the check for Brooks’ participation in an opulent jet-setting vacation that saw the opinionator relaxing in a posh Turkish hotel and taking in the sights. Here’s a snippet:
I tried but failed to ward off the second bottle of champagne. I was sitting in my room at the Four Seasons Hotel Istanbul at Sultanahmet, on the phone with a friend. The hotel staff had already brought me chocolates and Turkish delight to welcome me. They’d put bookmarks in the books I’d left on the desk. They’d replaced my bathmat midday because I’d gotten the first one wet. They’d arranged my notes for this article in clean little stacks. There was already one ice-bucketed bottle of champagne on the dining room table when the door chime rang.
Sullivan was pelted with requests from readers who wanted to know whether Brooks’ trip was gratis, an attempt by Four Seasons to garner publicity by wooing a marquee journalist. Not so, Sullivan writes:
Many on Twitter and elsewhere charged that this must be a junket — a free trip for a journalist, which is, of course, an ethical no-no. (Others objected in strong terms to the article’s concept, its tone, and the The Times’s relative wisdom of spending a large sum of money for this purpose.) The Times’s standards editor, Philip B. Corbett, assured me late Friday that the company had paid for the portion of that trip for which Mr. Brooks was present. (Yes, that covered both bottles of champagne.) A sentence in the article making the arrangement clear to readers would have been a good idea.