Managing Conflict of Interest: Shifting Between Political PR and Journalism

• In Event: Journalistic Professionalism and Professional Roles

Abstract

When a journalist returns to political reporting after working as a political media adviser it can trigger concern about conflict of interest. Despite this, there is little discussion in the journalism literature about how reporters should manage this type of conflict when it arises. This paper reports on a selection of findings from wider inductive, qualitative research into the under-explored career transition from journalism to political media advising and back again. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews conducted with twenty-one journalists who had moved between the two roles revealed that the media advisers took four main routes back to journalism in an attempt to manage the issue of conflicts of interest: Escape; Being ‘laundered’; Going ‘straight back in’; and, ‘Cooling-off’. Based on these findings, this paper argues that a uniform approach to managing the transition from political advising to journalism could be useful in easing public concern about possible conflicts of interest.

Author

• Caroline Fisher, University of Canberra