Corporate positions

In my 17-odd years in the Soviet Union for Reuters, the Company never to my knowledge ever adopted a formal position on “freedom of the press”. When in 1975 Gerald Long wrote a personal letter to Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko (which I delivered to the Foreign Ministry only to have it stuffed back into the Reuters mailbox a few days later apparently unopened) in protest at the unexplained refusal to grant a visa to a Belgrade-based colleague to join the Moscow bureau, his argument was entirely based on the difficulty this was causing for the Reuters news operation. Freedom to report was something we hoped for but under Long and his successor Glen Renfrew it was not something the company turned into a slogan, or a company “position”. Contrast that with the decision by the new North American leadership to take a public stance on the highly controversial social and very much political issue of same sex marriage. If some of the Baron commentators so far on this issue are correct, this is intended to be a corporate rather than an editorial stance. But I fear it betrays once again the failure of the New Reuters - unsurprising given the almost total absence of any agency experience in the top team prior to being brought in to take over the company four years ago - to understand what the old firm really was and what it stood for. There can be no separation between a public corporate position, taken to show Thomson Reuters understands what is “politically correct”, and an editorial position - at least in perception from the outside. Reuters journalists will inevitably be seen as messengers of the company position, with all that that might mean for their image. In Europe, where the debate is somewhat more rationally conducted, that may not be too much of a disadvantage. But in the United States, in Africa, and in Islamic countries? That is for the effect. But there is also the principle - that of our traditional neutrality and objectivity - although I take the point that total objectivity was always a myth and that choice of stories to cover could and can be determined by a journalist based on his own subjective view of the world. As colleagues have said earlier in this correspondence: why should the company not now take a public position on other political issues: on the conflict in Syria, on who should be elected as the next US president (at least one of the new “commentators” last year made no secret of his view), on whether the Falklands/Malvinas should remain British or be passed over to Argentina, or on what economic policies the EU should be following.

But there is another issue in all this. I personally I believe our gay and lesbian fellow humans should enjoy the same rights to have their unions fully recognised by the state, and by their employers, as did I and my wife nearly 50 years ago. However, there are almost certainly many employees or former employees who hold, possibly passionately, another view. In quite a number of countries where Reuters operates, the practice of homosexuality is a crime, and in some is a capital offence. What right has a corporate leadership to speak publicly for an entire body of staff around the world on such an issue? When the Old Reuters, recognising the pressure of the times and the change of public mood, dropped its previous refusal to post journalists abroad with their unmarried partners, it did this quietly without seeking to show how “modern” and “cool” it was through a public statement. The times have changed. ■