A Question of Ethics

By Scott Smith in News on Dec 6, 2006 4:00PM

An on-air remark by NBC-5 reporter LeeAnn Trotter is leaving the station open to questions about the integrity of its feature reporting on food, three years after it fired its restaurant critic for violations of its ethics policy.

Trotter is the host of “Good Eats,” a taped food segment filmed at a local restaurant that’s broadcast during the 4 o’clock news on Wednesdays. Viewers are encouraged to write in and tell NBC-5 about what restaurants they’d like to “review.” The station picks one, sends the viewers and Trotter to dine there, and later reports on the experience.

Questionable, however, is the manner in which these segments are packaged. Whether any ethics issues are really at work here is to be left up to the folks at The Poynter Institute. But so far, we’re seeing feature reporting presented as critical “reviews,” restaurants paying for the meals featured during the segments (a far from standard practice among local food journalists) and a piece on a restaurant suggested by a viewer who’s a friend of the restaurant’s owner. Our analysis, including comments from Trotter, after the jump.

Though the pieces themselves are free from any critical analysis of the restaurants, Trotter (and co-anchor Marion Brooks) often refer to the “Good Eats” segments as “reviews,” as they do in both the introduction and conclusion of features on Tank Sushi and Erie Café (though Brooks equivocates during the Tank Sushi piece by saying “they’re not real reviews”). In addition, the viewers shown in the piece are identified as "Good Eats Reviewers." The distinction is perhaps a matter of semantics to some, but the Association of Food Journalists is clear in its ethics guidelines about what constitutes a review, and “Good Eats” fails to meet those guidelines.

But accepted verbiage is a minor ethical issue compared to what happened at the end of the November 15 segment on Butterfly, a sushi/Thai restaurant in Bucktown. In the outro, Trotter says if they use a viewer’s suggestion, the viewer “can come with us and review it,” which leads to this exchange between her and Brooks:

Brooks: “Do we pay for the meal, too?”
Trotter: “We … they … they …”
Brooks: “Blah, blah, blah ...” (laughs)
Trotter: “They comp us.”
Brooks: “Oh they comp you. Oh good, we have to disclose that anyway.”

Anyone watching the video could reasonably question whether this was an honest attempt at disclosure. Trotter seems ill-prepared for Brooks’ question, and “they comp it” isn’t a very clear statement as to who is paying for the meal that was just featured. In fact, in a piece on the Kendall College Restaurant, Trotter says “we take you out” for the meal, implying that NBC-5 pays.

To clear the matter up, we called Trotter to discuss the issue. Of the segments, she said “it’s a review of this viewer’s favorite restaurants.” When we asked whether it would be more accurate to call it a feature, Trotter said, “In the technical sense … it’s one type of review. It’s the viewer that’s saying it’s his or her favorite.” According to Trotter, the segment is not a critical look at the restaurant by the station, or an endorsement by the station of the quality of the restaurant.

Fair enough. One person’s feature piece may be another person’s review. But what about the practice of receiving "comped" meals from the subjects of those features? Chicagoist contacted other food reporters and critics in the city, working in both print and broadcast media, and none accept free meals from the subjects they are covering, mainly because of the appearance of ethical impropriety.

In our interview, Trotter stated that she discloses in the “Good Eats” segments that the restaurants pay for the meals. When we told her that no disclosure appears in any of the segments we saw prior to the Butterfly piece November 15, she said “it is now” and encouraged us to look at those pieces. Trotter was upfront with us about the free food the station receives while filming the segment, and said suggestions for coverage come from viewers, not from the restaurants themselves. Trotter states that even though restaurants are paying for the meals presented, they aren’t paying for coverage because they’re not contacting the station directly or indirectly. “We check to make sure there are no ties with the reviewer and the restaurant,” she said of the process.

But this doesn’t appear to be true across the board. While a report on the Eleven City Diner that ran on November 29 ended with Trotter saying “in the honor of full disclosure, Eleven City Diner did comp our meal,” and no mention is made of the feature as a "review," Trotter says the following during at the beginning of the segment about the viewer who suggested the venue:

Jeff Belmonti is very particular about his corned beef. So when his friend Brad Rubin told him he was opening Eleven City Diner in the South Loop, he was a little skeptical.

To be fair, the piece is clearly disclosing that the viewer who appears in the piece, and presumably suggested that NBC-5 feature the restaurant on-air, is a friend of the owner. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with doing a segment on the Eleven City Diner as it’s certainly worth being covered. But the manner in which it was presented to NBC-5 seems to fly in the face of Trotter’s assertion that the people who suggest the segments have “no ties” with the restaurant and makes us wonder how NBC-5 received its other suggestions for “Good Eats” segments.

While Trotter is the face of this segment and doing the reporting, the decisions about how to report stories aren’t made in a vacuum. In any news-gathering organization there are people who set the standards for reporting and criticism. Still, while Trotter’s not making these decisions alone, her previous journalism career would ensure that she would be familiar with how this arrangement might look to the casual viewer.

All of the above is even more questionable when one considers that in 2003, NBC-5 fired its then-food critic David Lissner for appearing in a full-page advertisement for a restaurant. As reported by Robert Feder in the Sun-Times, “as owner and publisher of Chicago's Restaurant Guide … Lissner had a direct financial connection to the businesses he covered for Channel 5.” Feder went on to say, “virtually every journalism code of ethics requires those engaged in news operations to avoid conflicts of interest — whether real or perceived. For the most part, Lissner's lighter-than-air food 'reviews' amounted to commercials for the restaurants he chose to spotlight.”

To be clear, we’re not saying that “Good Eats” rises to the level of Lissner’s misdeeds. As we said at the top of this post, whether the segments are “reviews” or features, whether NBC-5 gets "comped" meals from restaurants it features in its “Good Eats” segments, and whether airing a segment suggested by a friend of the restaurant’s owner are all violations of journalistic ethics are best left to others. But if you were a television station who previously had to fire a food critic for ethics violations, wouldn’t you go out of your way to avoid even the appearance of impropriety in your food coverage?

Yeah. Us too.

Note: A follow-up to this story can be found here.

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