A break with practice

On tomorrow’s front page (and posted here now), you’ll see a story about Paul Coddington, a Concord School Board member who is seeking re-election. The story reports that Coddington, a lawyer, was disbarred last week.

I mention this here and now because it is our usual practice not to report news stories that might damage candidates on the day of or the day before an election. I want to explain why this story is an exception.

Had we known about Coddington’s disbarment earlier, we would have reported it earlier. But we didn’t. A Monitor editor heard during the weekend that Coddington was in some legal trouble. This morning, we assigned reporter Annmarie Timmins to look into it.

Before we knew the full extent of Coddington’s problem, editors discussed under what conditions we should report this story on election day. We had initially heard that he had been disciplined by the Professional Conduct Committee over financial problems but that the state Supreme Court had yet to decide on an appeal of the case.

This presented us with a problem. If we reported on the case, we would be giving readers a story that reflected negatively on Coddington but had not yet been fully resolved. And yet if we waited and did not report on it until after the election, we would be withholding information that readers should have before they voted.

But then Timmins got to the bottom of the story. Coddington was disbarred just last week for using clients’ accounts to pay his bills and for failing to cooperate with court officials. He was accused of mismanaging these accounts, not stealing from them. He had been suspended and under investigation since 2004. He told Timmins this afternoon that he intended to ask the court to reconsider. He said he had not heard about his disbarment until she told him.

When we discovered the extent of Coddington’s problem, we knew we had no choice but to report the story on election day.

To some readers, this situation may be complicated by the fact that we did not endorse Coddington for re-election to the school board. But that decision was made independently of the work of our reporting staff on the news pages. The editorial board had no idea when we chose not to endorse Coddington that he was in legal trouble. Likewise, the decision to publish the story has nothing to do with our editorial position on the election.

The reason newspapers generally avoid running hard-hitting stories about candidates on election day is fairness. There is no time for the stories to play out and little time for their subjects to respond to the news. But there are exceptions to most ethical standards, and the Coddington story is one of them. To have withheld it until after the election would have violated readers’ trust and been unfair to voters.