The Children of Politicians Are Not Public Figures. Except When They Are
An arrest, a wrecked SUV and a medevac flight: A perilous 5 months for Gov. Murphy's son
Josh Murphy, 20, made headlines during his father's inaugural. During a five-month period, he clashed with police in an…www.nj.com
N.J. Gov. Phil Murphy’s son, Joshua, was the subject today of a deeply researched story in The Star-Ledger today looking into a troubled stretch for the 20-year-old. As the story reports, the younger Murphy was charged in Massachusetts on Halloween with disorderly conduct and underage drinking, though the charges were recently dropped. He also, in a pair of pair of unrelated incidents, crashed a car and was hospitalized twice, with no charges being filed.
The story once again raises issues of responsible journalism, eliciting questions about who we consider to be public figures and why, and it has led some on both sides — meaning politicians and journalists — to react in a knee jerk fashion.
John Bramnick, the New Jersey Assembly Republican leader, for instance. tweeted out his displeasure with the Ledger story:
David Wildstein — who pled guilty in Chris Christie’s Bridgegate scandal — also chimed in:
Others, mostly from the news business, were quick to defend the Ledger, which spent six months on the story.
A Facebook friend offers this:
First off, Murphy’s son is not Barron Trump. He’s an adult. And you have no privacy when you are arrested — that’s true whether you are a celebrity or just Joe Shmoe. It’s one thing to say that you shouldn’t try to make political hay out of politician’s child over petty gossip (like the National Enquirer liked to do with the Obama daughter going to parties). But we have every right to know when an elected official’s relative has been caught up in the public criminal justice system and we have every business asking how public tax dollars and public resources are being spent for their benefit and whether they are being treated fairly (i.e., not getting special treatment.) This is journalism that needs to be done. You may not personally care. That’s fine. Just don’t read the story and move on.
That can be true, and perhaps it can help us create a template from which we can judge these things. I’m just not sure this story — focusing as it does on the personal foibles of young Murphy — does what it purports to do. I have the sense that the intent was to answer the “public tax dollars” question, but a key point made by the story is buried at its conclusion, which I think is a significant problem and creates the impression hat the story was more about sensationalism or politics than it was about public policy.
Given the young man’s age, the nature of the charges and his otherwise clean record, Murphy had been allowed to enter a pretrial diversion program, prosecutors said.
Under the terms of the agreement revealed in court, Murphy had performed 30 hours of community service, attended classes at college, completed a substance abuse assessment and education program, and wrote a letter of apology to Tufts University police. He was also expected to remain in school, which the judge said he had.
In exchange, the District Attorney’s office dropped the charges.
The judge said in court “this type of disposition is fairly routine” for these types of cases.
It wasn’t until shortly before the hearing, the judge noted, that he learned Josh Murphy’s father is the governor of New Jersey.
Murphy appears to be a troubled kid, though not unlike most other 20-year-old kids — unlucky, possibly taken with his own privilege — but it does not appear that his indiscretions in this case rise to he level of public concern. The closest the Ledger comes to establishing this is the unanswered question of whether public money was spent on a trip to being an injured Joshua home from the Bahamas.
My point here is not to criticize the Ledger — I think the story was worth reporting, though I think it’s execution could have been better, and needed to make clearer that it did not find any wrongdoing or abuse of power — but to ask when he kids of public officials become public officials themselves. I think the Murphy administration response was too defensive. The governor and his wife accused the Ledger of “sacrific(ing) journalistic integrity for cheap sensationalism without regard for the truth or the harm inflicted.”
They said the paper “repeatedly harassed” their son’s friends and classmates, as well as school administrators, government employees, and others “under the false claim of promoting the public interest.”
Unlike us, our children are not public figures. We refuse to accept this treatment as the norm for the children of any public official. As parents, we have refused to participate in this shoddy and reprehensible attack that is masking as ‘journalism’ and does absolutely nothing to serve the public interest.
But there can be no invasion of privacy when the incidents being reported were public information.
So what are the ground rules?
That’s complicated and is best summed up this way: the children of elected and appointed public figures are not public figures except when they are.
I think you have to start with age. Children who are, literally, children — meaning under the age of 18 — should be off-limits (with exceptions). This doesn’t mean all adult children should be fair game, only that they are open to scrutiny.
I used to do an exercise with my first-year journalism students that forced them to consider these kinds of questions. The idea was to pose a basic question and then change the variables and, in turn, to see whether these shifts lead to different decisions.
One scenario we explored focused on the child of a public figure. As a reporter, you get a tip that the daughter of a public figure has had an abortion. Should you pursue the story? The answer here seems pretty plain: no. It’s a private matter.
What if we change the age — to say, 16. It doesn’t matter. The age in this case shouldn’t affect the decision. But what about other variables? Does it matter that it is a local politician who has no control over the laws? A state or federal official? A politician who has obvious ambitions for higher office? You could make a case for reporting the story, though I think it would be a weak one. The teen’s right to privacy would appear to outweigh any public need to know under these circumstances.
What if the politician is pro-life? He regularly makes speeches opposing abortion, has voted to restrict it, and has promised to support judges who will overturn Roe v. Wade. Does this matter?
Here the discussion gets more complicated. The daughter is still entitled to her privacy, but the hypocrisy has introduced a question of public interest. More reporting will be needed, but we now have a real ethical quandary on our hands. The age of the daughter now may matter, as do her own public statements on abortion, or lack of comment, and even the circumstances under which the abortion was performed.
Imagine, for instance, that this politician lives and has been elected in a state with a waiting period and rules that have led to the shut down of most clinics. She flies to a state like New Jersey, gets her abortion and flies back the same day. Does this change the equation? Has her relatively privileged position allowed her to skirt the rules her father has put in place for the rest of he state’s women?
These are not easy questions to answer, even without the pressures of a deadline and competition, of higher-level management, and so on.
The abortion scenario is an extreme one, I think, but the fact that it eludes simple calculus should give pause both to journalists and politicians who want to claim there is only one answer. The reality is that ethical decisions often must be made on a case-by-case basis, balancing competing principles and often by making compromises that will leave some folks unhappy.