"The National Association of Black Journalists wrote a letter of support Saturday for Washington Post journalist Robin Givhan..."

"... after she wrote a piece on former First Lady Michelle Obama’s talk at a BET event that many of the guests assumed was off-the-record," writes Terell Jermaine Starr at The Root.

“As the world’s largest journalism organization of people of color, it is vital that NABJ stands up for the rights of journalists to do their job without being attacked,” the NABJ Board of Directors wrote in a letter. “Robin Givhan did not break any journalistic code of ethics in her decision to write about Michelle Obama at the BET conference.”

Per reporting from The Root’s Editor-in-Chief Danielle Belton, who was present at the event, BET said it was clear that the event was “an intimate conversation in a sacred space of sisterhood and fellowship.”

From the comments there:

The way some of her peers that I hold in high regard made me give them the side-eye with their responses to her. They came off looking like Black mean girls, even though they’re grown ass women. I’m happy NABJ sided with her.

Also, even though BET is rehabilitating [its] image and program standards, when they fuck up, they fuck hard. Devil Lee and who ever decided to kick her out needs to apologize to her.

I guess "Devil Lee" is Debra Lee (who, as we see in the original Robin Givhan essay, organized the conference).

From the piece by The Root’s Editor-in-Chief Danielle Belton (linked above):

An overwhelming majority of [conference] attendees The Root spoke to felt the talk with Michelle Obama was private based on the fact that BET Networks told attendees to put down their phones and not record the conversation once it started....

“I absolutely felt that this was an off-the-record conversation between Valerie Jarrett and the former first lady,” said Jamilah Lemieux, vice president of news and mens programming at iOne digital. “There was nothing in me that suspected otherwise. I did wonder, at the point when it became clear to me that this was meant to be off-the-record, I remember thinking, ‘Who in this space is going to violate the sanctity of this moment?’ I did not expect that there would be a writer in the room who heard the same instructions that I did about putting phones away and ‘this is a safe space’ and then would go on to report and in great detail about what they’d heard.... This may be a situation where the spirit of the law and the letter of the law don’t agree with one another, but I think that the spirit of this room required that Robin Givhan put her pen down and listen.... I wish she had.”

I'm very interested in this notion of the "spirit of the law" — the "spirit" of journalistic ethics. The NABJ referred to the "letter of the law" — that is, the official code of journalistic ethics — and announced that Givhan was in the clear. But what about the spirit? The letter/spirit distinction is a big topic, but that means it's got its own Wikipedia entry and you can brush up on it super-quick (and complete with references to Shakespeare and Jesus).

I'd just like to say that if we move beyond the letter to the spirit of journalistic ethics, we ought to talk about what the spirit is. Lemieux only says what she thinks it is — that Givhan should have kept the secrets of the inner circle to which her privileged stature gained her access. I would think the spirit is something closer to "The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable," and Michelle Obama and Valerie Jarrett definitely fall into the comfortable category. Not that Givhan "afflicted" them. She only wrote respectfully about what she heard, and even that is not good enough for those who seem to think that the spirit of journalism is to protect the powerful who are on your side.

(Click the Robin Givhan tag to get back to the 3 posts I've already done on this controversy.)