EDMONTON - Wildrose leader Danielle Smith says her husband, veteran journalist David Moretta, has stepped down from his position as a senior executive at Sun TV.
“We don’t want it to look like he is trying to influence the news coverage, we don’t want his employer to have any allegations that in some way they are being biased, so we had to make the decision for him to leave,” Smith said Monday, one day after announcing the resignation on the social media network Twitter.
“We knew it would become increasingly difficult for him to be able to do his job without the perception of conflict of interest,” she said.
“At this point, it’s too difficult for him, working in a Calgary newsroom with the amount of attention that both the newspapers as well as the national network are paying to provincial politics.”
Moretta’s terms of employment prevent him from speaking publicly about his departure. A spokesman for the Sun News Network also declined to comment, citing the company’s human resources policy.
Nick Russell is an expert in journalism ethics and author of Morals and the Media: Ethics in Canadian Journalism. He said the resignation is an attempt to maintain the Sun TV’s credibility and to mitigate the perception of bias.
“So long as (Moretta) is there, readers, viewers will assume the newsroom can never report anything negative about Smith and the party, that they cannot editorialize against them, that when an election comes they cannot report objectively,” Russell said.
“That’s the danger. It’s all about credibility, and without credibility we (journalists) have nothing.”
In an attempt to address allegations of bias, Sun TV had Moretta sign a written agreement that restricted his influence over coverage of Alberta politics. Russell said such internal memos would do little address public concerns about influence and bias.
Further, Russell said there is a risk that reporters working in the Sun newsrooms would self-censor, knowing that a key executive is married to the Wildrose leader.
“Nobody is going to say critical things about the boss’s wife,” he said.
The Edmonton Journal
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