4 ms·
It would be pretty irresponsible for the city government not to have some budget for good will items like this. It’s not about making a favored victim whole. It
by 4death4 3y ago
It would be pretty irresponsible for the city government not to have some budget for good will items like this. It’s not about making a favored victim whole. It’s about preventing a news crew going back to their country and saying “hey, we wanted to air a story on X, but we were robbed so we’re doing a story on SF crime instead”
- perihelions 3y agoI assume the city is ethically barred from offering gifts of that type, and that the reporters are ethically barred from accepting any.
- 4death4 3y agoWhy would you assume either of those things? There is no conflict of interest for the city here. The journalists, maybe, but such a conflict would be tenuous.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 3y agoWould it be legal for the mayor to make a gifts to reporters conditional on positive coverage? To invent an example: write a positive story, get a red curb parking pass. Write a negative story, we take the pass away. It seems like that ought to be illegal. Since the quid pro quo might be implicit and hard to prove, ethics rules in other contexts sometimes ban gifts entirely. In my view, there are enough other factors going on here that this doesn’t look very corrupt. Nevertheless, I expect those reporters are probably now debating how negative a story they have to write to avoid the appearance of impropriety!
- uoaei 3y agoThe conflict of interest is precisely defined in GP. This is tantamount to bribery paid to journalists so they write a nicer story. Corruption is corruption.