Asheville Citizen-Times reporter Boyd in hot water over ethics violation; says she’ll have announcement Tuesday

Political bloggers Timothy Peck and ThunderPig, as well as Asheville Tea Party organizer Erika Franzi, blew the whistle on Asheville Citizen-Times reporter Leslie Boyd at the end of last week for an alleged ethics violation. That whistle’s turned into a screaming siren of attention.

It seems that Boyd did indeed run afoul of the newspaper’s ethics policy. It also seems to me that she won’t be able to continue in her current role at the newspaper. More on that in a minute.

Peck, Pig and Franzi jumped after lefty organizers MoveOn.org issued a press release about health care reform that included a reference to Asheville Citizen-Times reporter Leslie Boyd. Boyd has been on a one-woman crusade for reform after her son, Mike, died of cancer more than a year ago. I’m not sure of the details of his story, but I don’t believe he had health insurance.

In the past year, Boyd has created a non-profit organization called Life O’ Mike to tell her son’s story and raise awareness about what she sees as the issues around health care reform. The organization’s Web site is currently down.

Boyd spoke at a health care reform rally earlier this year in Pritchard Park, the event at which she apparently got into trouble. She was a speaker at the event, and she also shot photos which were used by the newspaper. That’s a pretty clear conflict of interest.

The interesting thing is that Boyd has been walking this fine line of making news, and covering it, for several months. And anyone who knows Boyd knows that she’s not shy about telling you her opinion on specific issues. Yet the local newspaper leadership – Publisher Randy Hammer and Editor Phil Fernandez – haven’t taken action. 

Until now.

I saw and talked with Boyd this weekend at Bele Chere. She said there’s a lot going on right now in terms of her situation, and she declined to talk about it. But she said she planned to have an announcement on Tuesday. She said she’d talk with me in detail as soon as she can. 

Franzi emailed out a press release on Thursday alleging Boyd’s ethics violation. She notes Boyd’s actions and the related newspaper policy. Franzi is meeting with Hammer to talk about this issue on Thursday. Her take:

When Ms. Boyd became a journalist, she made the choice to be an impartial observer and reporter of the news. She promised to uphold a code of ethics which prohibits her from entering into the public politics and activism. This was a career choice that she made and, judging by the name she has made for herself at the Asheville Citizen-Times, it was a good one. If she has now changed her mind and wishes to enter the political activism arena, that is indeed her prerogative. What she may not do, however, is straddle the fence between the two occupations. She may not make the news and report it too.

Timothy Peck blogged this story on Thursday. He has the MoveOn e-mail, the newspaper ethics policy, and more as he chronicles the ethics blunder.

ThunderPig lays out the situation in this blog post. His bottom line:

It is time we held “journalists” accountable. And they wonder why they are held in in low regard by their fellow Americans. I would tell them that their lefty bias has turned a significant portion of their audience off. I quit buying papers from the AC-T over two years ago because I couldn’t just take it anymore. … Let this incident serve notice to the various news media outlets of western North Carolina that they can no longer serve as Gate Keepers of the news, nor can they set the agenda as they have in the past. They should come clean about their biases, as most bloggers do.