Perhaps the worst thing to happen to journalism over the years is its simplistic over-reliance on the mere "appearance of impropriety" to justify big, splashy stories.
It's based on the assumption that everybody is corrupt. No actual wrongdoing need ever be found - just something that might look a bit fishy to a reporter's overly suspicious eyes. There's no need to prove anything; one or two distant connections is enough to justify destroying somebody's reputation - which didn't deserve protection anyway because everybody is evil.
And that brings us to Dave McKinney, who resigned last week as the Statehouse bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times. It was a reversal of what's become the norm: In this case, a politician caught a journalist in the appearance-of-impropriety web.
McKinney married political consultant Ann Liston in April. Months before, however, McKinney, Liston, and her business partner Eric Adelstein constructed a "firewall" between Liston and Illinois politics. Adelstein formed a new company to handle all Illinois accounts, and Liston would not participate in those campaigns or receive any compensation. The Sun-Times signed off on this change in January.
That should've been the end of it. The campaign of GOP gubernatorial nominee Bruce Rauner knew about McKinney's marriage and never once complained, especially when McKinney was repeatedly and thoroughly gutting Governor Pat Quinn over his botched 2010 anti-violence initiative.
Rauner's campaign waited until October to play the appearance-of-impropriety card against McKinney when the Sun-Times ran a big story about how two people swore in affidavits that Rauner had issued threats against a top female executive at one of his investment firm's companies.
After failing to derail the piece, the Rauner campaign launched an attack on McKinney, who was just one of the story's three authors.
Rauner's campaign falsely charged that Liston was directly involved with and directly profiting from anti-Rauner efforts in Illinois. It claimed McKinney should never been put on the story.
Instead of telling the Rauner people to suck an egg, McKinney's bosses sidelined the reporter for the better part of the week. Rauner had successfully used the appearance-of-impropriety attack against one of the state's top political reporters just three weeks before an election. McKinney hired famed former federal prosecutor Patrick Collins and was quickly taken off his informal suspension.
But the paper balked at putting McKinney back on his beat. He was offered other positions at the paper, which he considered demotions. And then his editors initially refused to put his byline on a follow-up piece to the Rauner-threat story. McKinney quit.
But the Sun-Times has its own appearance-of-impropriety problems. Rauner owned 10 percent of the paper until last year. A published report claims Rauner purchased 900,000 shares of a once-struggling business controlled by the chair of the Sun-Times' parent company.
Even worse, the paper's publisher called the Rauner campaign's allegations against McKinney "spurious" as well as "inaccurate and defamatory." Yet that same publisher reversed his almost-three-year-old policy of not endorsing candidates and approved an enthusiastic endorsement of Rauner around the very same time, leading many to ask why he would support someone for governor after the candidate had "defamed" the guy who would be covering Rauner in Springfield if he's elected.
One would hope that journalists and their editors would learn from this debacle. The appearance of impropriety is always in the eye of the beholder. It's impossible to defend against if someone is willing to suspend all disbelief and push that angle hard enough.
But this mindset is too deeply embedded to be abandoned so easily, even after it unjustly derailed a good man's career.
Rich Miller also publishes Capitol Fax (a daily political newsletter) and CapitolFax.com.
