Vince Doria on Evolution of Sports Media Celebrities

Vince Doria (Director of News, ESPN) has been granted the right by society to tell billions of people what to think. Someone considered him a 'national leader,' and therefore eligible for a friendly interview on ethics-related topics. This one mentioned the transition of a newspaper reporter to a television celebrity, a decision in which Doria was involved while at The Boston Globe. Interview by Bruce Weinstein of "The Ethics Guy" blog in 2006:

• "Vince Doria, senior vice president and director of news for ESPN (www.espn.com). Vince has also worked for the Boston Globe and the Philadelphia Inquirer.".....

Bruce: What is one of the toughest ethical challenges you have faced in your work, and how did you handle it? In retrospect, do you believe you did the right thing?

Vince: Many years ago, when I was sports editor of the Boston Globe, Will McDonough, perhaps the premier football writer of his time, was offered roughly three times what the Globe was paying him to appear on the Sunday morning "NFL Today" show on CBS. This preceded the mass defection of print journalists to television, and at the time, the general attitude of newspapers was : "Reporters work for us, we control their work product, we pay for it, we should never let the electronic media infringe on that." That was an easy enough attitude to have when reporters were being offered a couple of dollars to appear on local radio. When network television money came into the equation, enough to lure writers away from their print jobs, the decisions became harder. Our decision was to let McDonough work for CBS on Sundays, while continuing to work for the Globe on the other six days.

At the time, many editors around the country felt we had betrayed our own ethics by essentially sharing Will with CBS, giving the network first crack at his reporting on Sunday morning. Given the current state of affairs, the attitude seems somewhat puzzling, but at the time we were much criticized for the decision. To this day I believe it was the right one, and addressed what would become a very different landscape. As it happened, Will's exposure on national television greatly widened his circle of sources, and brought a lot of news stories to the Globe on Monday through Saturday, stories we likely would not have gotten without Will's higher profile.

Pragmatism shouldn't be an excuse for abandoning one's ethics. But ethical parameters also evolve over time, usually because someone examines them and determines they may no longer address reality. I'd like to feel I was on the cutting edge of that, that I made a decision that was the best one for Globe readers. But every once in a while, I still wonder about it."

Interview by Bruce Weinstein, 2006, from his blog The Ethics Guy

"ABOUT THE ETHICS GUY Bruce Weinstein, Ph.D. received a B.A. in philosophy from Swarthmore College, a Ph.D. in philosophy and bioethics from Georgetown University, and a certificate in film production from New York University. ABOUT THE ETHICS GUY Bruce Weinstein, Ph.D. received a B.A. in philosophy from Swarthmore College, a Ph.D. in philosophy and bioethics from Georgetown University, and a certificate in film production from New York University. He appears as an ethics analyst from time to time on CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360" and other national television news programs".

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