Checkbook Journalism, Checkbook Politics

You will be familiar with - and no doubt appalled by - the story of the MPs allowances scandal in Britain. To refresh your memory have a look at the post below, "The Manure Parliament." The scandal broke after the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph paid something in the neighborhood of £100,000 for the data about MPs' expenses - data which the Telegraph has said was copied and not stolen from the parliamentary authorities who were reviewing all the paperwork.

Yesterday the official version of the story finally emerged when more than a million pieces of paper — bills, receipts and claim forms — were posted on the House of Commons website. The contrast between the official story and the Telegraph version could not have been more dramatic, or disheartening. Thousands of the documents were indecipherable: much of the information was blacked out as the MPs, helped by the authorities, censored incriminating material, citing security and privacy. By "redacting" addresses, for example, it was impossible to tell from the official version which MPs “flipped” their second homes to maximise returns from the taxpayer or changed the designation of their homes to avoid paying capital gains tax.

All well and good. But it's interesting to note, whatever your point of view, that this story is unlikely to have broken in the same way in the United States. Under their ethics codes, mainstream American media would almost certainly not been able to pay for information the way the Telegraph did. Note this from the New York Times company policy on ethics in journalism: "We do not pay for interviews or unpublished documents: to do so would create an incentive for sources to falsify material and would cast into doubt the genuineness of much that we publish." Having said that, the ethical boundaries in the UK are by no means sacrosanct. Though both are so-called "quality" dailies, The Times of London turned down on ethical grounds an offer to buy what the Telegraph did.

Finally, the pall that this story has cast over politics in Britain is remarkable, and a bit scary. Voices of reason have had a great deal of difficulty cutting through the angry static. One that has belongs to Peter Riddell who says today: "Rough justice is no justice. The flood of disclosures about MPs’ expenses has led to a haphazard mess in which there is no obvious reason why one MP should be forced out but another survives."