Professional journalism ethics suggest reporters should avoid conflicts of interest and, well, be accurate. Maybe Mortimer Zuckerman didn’t get that memo. Zuckerman said he couldn’t make political contributions – when he’s made 12 contributions to candidates in 13 years, 10 to Democrats.
Zuckerman, editor-in-chief of U.S. News & World Report and chairman of Boston Properties (NYSE: [1]BXP), was asked about donating money to Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Hillary Clinton’s fading campaign by Huffington Post blogger and MSNBC “Morning Joe” regular John Ridley.
“I wish I could make a contribution, but I’m in the world of journalism and I can’t, but thank you for the offer,” Zuckerman said on May 9.
Oops. Maybe Zuckerman forgot, but his conflict of interest statement hasn’t stopped him from donating in the past – the recent past. According to [2]OpenSecrets.org, a Web site maintained by the Center for Responsive Politics that tracks campaign contributions, Zuckerman has given $26,700 to individual campaign from 1995 to as recently as December 2007.
More than half that money was donated to Democratic candidates. The exceptions were $10,000 to former-Democrat-turned-Independent Sen. Joseph Lieberman.(I-Conn.) and $1,000 in 1995 donated to Sen. John Warner (R-Va.).Lieberman and Warner have co-sponsored global warming legislation to push a cap-and-trade bill in Congress.
Zuckerman has been portrayed as an economic prophet by the media. In the MSNBC segment, he warned that high oil prices “represent a huge threat to the basic economic security of this country.” He was [3]interviewed on the March 18 “NBC Nightly News” and spouted doom and gloom (similar to the [4]claims he made just two months earlier.)
“Mort Zuckerman doesn’t sugarcoat it,” NBC correspondent Mike Taibbi said. “One of the country’s wealthiest real estate developers and the editor-in-chief of U.S. News & World Report has been saying for months we’re in the worst economic downturn of his lifetime.”
The problem with that statement is Zuckerman was [5]born in 1937, during the Great Depression. According to Britannica.com, the Depression was a “worldwide economic downturn that began in 1929 and lasted until about 1939.” Other sources give the ending date as the early 1940s.