This is an interesting and tragic story in Miami. A Miami politician who was outed soliciting prostitutes and laundering money killed himself in the lobby of the Miami Herald. Before doing so, the distraught man called one of the paper’s columnists, a friend of many years. Sensing something was wrong, the columnist began recording the conversation without telling the politician. The conversation turned out to be the man’s suicide note. (Recording a phone conversation without informing the other party is illegal in Florida, but it’s not in many other states. Even in Florida, law is murky at best, as the New York Times reports, citing a 1991 case that allowed business phone conversations to be privately recorded in that state.) Even when in violation of the law, reporters receive strong reprimands and they are taken seriously as violations, but rarely does much else happen. Nonetheless, in this day when newspapers are out to prove they are beyond reproach, the newspaper promptly fired the columnist–even before the crime scene was cleared from their own lobby–basically ending a reporter’s career. Is that fair? Debate has already started. Let me ask one more question: If it’s such a violation, why did the newspaper run excerpts of that same recorded conversation on the front page of its next newspaper?
