Newspaper ethicist of a bygone era
EARLIER THIS WEEK, Barry Bingham Jr., newspaper publishing's most impassioned ethicist, died of respiratory illness 20 years after losing his newspaper to family strife.
Would it have made an important difference if the battling Bingham family had been able to find a solution that would have left Bingham in command of The Courier-Journal? Yes.
In 1986, Barry Bingham Sr. announced his decision to sell The Courier-Journal and Louisville Times after three generations of family ownership. Barry Jr., who was 52 and had been running the family business, denounced his father's action as ''a betrayal" that had brought a premature end to his life's work as the steward of an important news organization. The announcement was made after bitter quarreling among family members, including two sisters who had fallen out with their brother.
Everyone involved had a share of blame for what was widely viewed as a family tragedy and a catastrophe for high-quality journalism. Without question, Barry Jr.'s stubborn streak contributed to the family meltdown, but that rigidity had a positive side as well.
The best part of Barry Bingham Jr. was his conviction that newspapers were public trusts that also happened to be commercial enterprises. He viewed himself as a steward of that trust, which included the obligation to keep the enterprise safely profitable, but was primarily about providing high-quality news while observing the highest ethical standards.
For Bingham, this was not a platitude -- being the most literal of men was both his strength and his weakness. If he said it, he meant it, and he rarely changed his mind.
Had Bingham been publisher of The Courier-Journal for the past 20 years, one can easily imagine that his newspaper would now be viewed as a city on a hill surrounded by a flooded landscape.
The newspaper industry's time-honored commitment to public service has been weakened over the past two decades. Most newspapers are in chains owned by corporations that view their first obligation as maximizing profits to shareholders.
One can easily imagine that Bingham would not only have operated his newspaper differently, but would probably have been an outspoken critic of his fellow publishers.
He would not have pounded a desk or shaken his fist, but stated with a brutal civility that the newspaper industry had been founded on principles of public service and that those principles must come first, even at the expense of profit margins.
He would have been appalled at the series of press scandals that have rocked newspapers and demanded of The Courier-Journal a standard of behavior that would have been an industry model.
It was The Courier-Journal, after all, that had introduced the concept of an ombudsman, whose job was to be an in-house moral arbiter acting on behalf of readers. His newspaper would have been highly transparent and perhaps a bit sanctimonious about lapses in journalism ethics by other news organizations. But better sanctimony than silence.
Though his newspaper would have clung to time-honored -- that is to say old-fashioned -- principles, it would almost certainly have also been leading the charge to the Internet and new technology. By the 1980s, Bingham was preaching that news in the form of ink on paper was apt to be ''the last dinosaur in the swamp," and he had no intention of being mired in that bog. When it came to adapting to the opportunities and challenges of high technology, it is easy to imagine that his newspaper would have been at the very front of the leading edge.
He was not a businessman by instinct or temperament and, oddly enough, his yearning to be thought a business success was one of his blind spots. In the years after losing The Courier-Journal, Bingham started Fineline, a journalism ethics newsletter devoted to the thorny ethical dilemmas faced constantly in news rooms. It was an excellent publication, and very much needed. When it could not turn a profit, he ceased publication because he said it had to be able to stand on its own feet financially. He refused to use his personal fortune to support it, as a matter of principle.
His tendency to have tunnel vision did not always serve him well. But in most respects, his vision was an inspiring one and his example is sorely missed. To have had such a stubborn, bloody-minded, highly principled man leading an important newspaper for the past 20 years would have been a national blessing.
Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones coauthored ''The Patriarch: The Rise and Fall of the Bingham Dynasty." 
