WAS DUNPHY DONATION ETHICAL?

ABC News policy bars staffers who cover news stories or make news judgments from “active participation”--including campaign contributions--”in partisan political campaigns.” But does that apply to Jerry Dunphy, the silver-haired anchorman of ABC-owned KABC-TV?

The question arises--along with one of journalistic ethics--because he contributed $100 to a campaign to defeat the reelection bid of California Chief Justice Rose Bird, many of whose opponents consider her soft on criminals, particularly in cases involving the death penalty.

Dunphy was the victim of a shooting in 1983 and of an armed robbery at his home in 1982. His donation, the California Secretary of State’s office says, went to Crime Victims for Court Reform, one of three large organizations seeking Bird’s defeat in November. The group has reported raising $407,000 so far in that cause.

There are varied opinions on whether Dunphy, by contributing to the anti-Bird campaign, has transgressed journalistic traditions of objectivity and neutrality, and thus undermined his credibility as a newscaster.

Neither he nor news director Terry Crowfoot was available to comment on that or to say whether ABC News’ policy on political activity is also followed by the station’s news reporters, editors and anchors. A KABC spokeswoman says the station has no comment.

“I’d call it (Dunphy’s contribution) a striking conflict of interest,” says retired CBS News executive Burton Benjamin, now a senior fellow at the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University in New York.

No one is without flaw, “but I think when you’re an anchorman, when you move beyond supporting the Red Cross, you’re in trouble,” adds Benjamin, a 29-year CBS News veteran who next month plans to begin a book on fairness in journalism.

Burton’s hard-line opinion is echoed by Eric Sorenson, news director at CBS-owned KCBS-TV. “A cash contribution is real conflict of interest,” Sorenson said Wednesday. “I don’t see how anybody could say it isn’t.”

Tom Capra, news director at NBC-owned KNBC News, takes a far milder view of Dunphy’s $100 contribution: “It seems to be a minor infraction. I don’t think Jerry intended it to be a public position at all, and I’d think you’d have to take that into account.”

Burton says he knows of “no reputable newspaper or broadcast group organization that doesn’t have guidelines” against political partisanship by its news staff.

However, despite ABC News’ clear ban on campaign contributions to partisan political campaigns, there is no specific prohibition against them at NBC News or CBS News--although KCBS’ Sorenson emphasizes that he and CBS News regard such contributions as a definite no-no.

Both, he says, would interpret such contributions “as an absolute conflict of interest” that violated news policies of the station and the network.

Not only do the policies bar conflict of interest by news staffers, he says, “they go beyond that and say that as a news employee you have to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest.”

NBC News policy, which Capra says is followed at KNBC, warns that if a staffer “publicly identified as an NBC News employee takes a public opinion (stand) on a controversial public issue, that position, despite disclaimers, will be attributed inevitably to NBC News and will undermine its credibility as an objective news organization.

“To avoid or minimize these consequences, employees who take a public position on controversial public issues, including participation in political campaigns, will be subject to such disciplinary action as NBC News may consider appropriate . . .”

Capra was asked what he would do if a situation similar to the Dunphy case occurred at KNBC. He said that he would ask the staffer involved “if he or she intended to take a public position, and if not, I’d just hope it’d blow over.”

In the 1982 robbery at Dunphy’s Encino home, the veteran anchorman was accosted by two men who tied him up, ransacked his house, took $13,000 in cash and jewelry, and fled in his Rolls-Royce, according to police.

A year later, he and Sandra Marshall, a makeup woman whom he later married, were wounded in a late-night shooting in which assailants in a car opened fire on them while Dunphy and Marshall were in his Rolls-Royce at a stop sign outside KABC’s Hollywood studio.

Three men later were charged in the shooting. Only one, Frederick Cole, 24, was convicted. He was sentenced last July to 14 years and eight months in prison for attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon and conspiracy to commit robbery.