Herald executives defended the firing of Metro columnist Jim DeFede, as well as the newspaper's coverage of former Miami Commissioner Art Teele.

BY CHRISTINA HOAG

Herald executives on Thursday defended their decision to fire columnist Jim DeFede, saying that he not only likely broke the law by taping a source without his consent but also violated the newspaper's ethical standards.

''What Jim did was not in keeping with the ethics of our profession. Added to that, it was probably illegal,'' Publisher Jesús Díaz Jr. told a room packed with stunned and dismayed newsroom staff members. ``We have to hold ourselves to a higher standard.''

DeFede was fired late Wednesday after he told Díaz that he had recorded a conversation with former Miami Commissioner Arthur Teele Jr. shortly before Teele pulled out a gun and shot himself in the head in the lobby of The Herald.

DeFede, who had known Teele for years, said that he made the recording without first asking Teele for permission, as Florida law requires. Many other states allow conversations to be taped as long as one party consents.

''He had broken a basic tenet of The Miami Herald,'' Executive Editor Tom Fiedler said. ``We abide by the law. We, as journalists, operate in a world where we hold people to high standards and ourselves to higher standards.''

Díaz said Teele's suicide would not cause the newspaper to flinch in its news coverage.

''I don't know why he chose The Miami Herald building,'' Díaz said. ``I can surmise he was trying to deliver a message to us that our coverage had something to do with his decision. What we did in our reporting of Mr. Teele's situation was simply our job, our duty. We report the story and the facts as we know them to be at the time.''

POLICE INVESTIGATION

Díaz said the police had requested that The Herald turn over DeFede's tape as part of their investigation of the suicide. The newspaper has refused because The Herald doesn't turn over unpublished notes and Teele had requested that the conversation be off the record, he said.

''We're going to honor that,'' Díaz said. ``We expect we will get subpoenaed and we will say we will not meet the subpoena and we'll end up in court.''

Wednesday night, DeFede told The Herald that he did not agree with his firing, saying his transgression warranted a suspension and a public apology.

In an interview Thursday with WFOR-CBS4 reporter Gary Nelson, DeFede recounted his conversation with Teele.

'I told [Teele], `You've got a good attorney. If you're innocent, the truth would come out' . . . I thought he might commit suicide. . . . It was a very tense situation. I was shaking. I wanted to preserve the record. I knew it was an important moment. I rolled the tape on impulse.''

Many of DeFede's colleagues rallied to his defense on Thursday, charging the dismissal was too hasty a decision and too harsh a punishment. Some said they felt ''betrayed'' by executives' reaction to a reporter freely confessing that he had made a mistake.

Several former Herald reporters quickly put up a petition on a website (http://journalistsfor defede.blogspot.com), requesting The Herald take DeFede back.

''We believe firing him was an overreaction to an offense that should be viewed in the context of an intense, immediate episode during which he had little time to consider his actions,'' said the petition, which is signed by several Herald staff members and other journalists.

Fiedler said DeFede's transgression was severe enough to warrant a firing, equating it to plagiarism and other instances where the public's trust in the newspaper's role as an advocate of truth is broken.

''We can't have an atmosphere where people feel there are loose boundaries, where people feel they can do something on their own and get away with it. We aren't going to have different rules for the star columnist and for the rest,'' he said.

Díaz said executives decided not to delay in firing DeFede because the writer openly related to them the facts of the case. The decision was made after careful consultation with top newsroom managers and General Counsel Robert Beatty.

Labor-law expert Heather Gatley said many employers would have reacted similarly.

''It's a decision a reasonable employer would make. The fact that [DeFede] fessed up would not make an exception to most employers,'' said Gatley, who is head of human-resource services and general counsel for AlphaStaff, an outsourcing firm in Boca Raton.

''You've got an employer here who's got to be careful about precedent with all the other reporters. If they had just brushed this aside, that's a really bad message The Herald would have sent,'' she said. ``And this would have come out eventually. Certainly, The Herald could get sued for Jim's action.''

Journalism ethics Professor Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg agreed that DeFede's action was not to be viewed lightly.

''People have a reasonable expectation to know when they're going to be taped,'' he said. ``Even if it's legal, it still doesn't mean journalists should tape people without knowledge of the other party. People need to understand how we operate. It's right for journalists to explain the rules of the conversation.''

But, Tompkins said, there are exceptions that should only be made with approval from the news organization in cases where ``the harm we would cause by the deception is outweighed by the public's need to know. I'm not hearing that in this case.''

The Herald's Fiedler said that he supported the right of journalists to break the law only in extraordinary circumstances, where the story is of high public interest and cannot be reported without, for example, going undercover, using a hidden microphone or trespassing. In those cases, the reporting methods must be approved beforehand by editors, Fiedler said.

DeFede agreed this was not one of those cases, the editor said.

Miami Police Chief John Timoney said it would be up to the state attorney's office whether to open an investigation into DeFede's tape recording.

''I wouldn't be surprised if there's some kind of action taken, though it's only a misdemeanor,'' Timoney said. He added that taping someone without consent is a felony only when the tape is for illegal use, such as blackmail.

OTHER CASES

Teele's suicide is not the first linked to negative news coverage, but it is extremely rare, said Kelly McBride, the leader of the Poynter Institute's ethics group.

In 2000, The Plain Dealer in Cleveland weathered a firestorm of criticism after local TV personality Joel Rose killed himself when the newspaper published stories that he was under investigation for sending women sexually suggestive messages and clothing.

In 1987, Pennsylvania state Treasurer Budd Dwyer, convicted of taking kickbacks and facing 55 years in prison, called a news conference and shot himself in the mouth as TV cameras rolled.

These cases are inevitably difficult for the media involved to cover because the messenger gets accused of having a role in the death, McBride said.

The Herald was swamped with e-mails and phone calls on Thursday from readers who were incensed by DeFede's dismissal, as well as the graphic front-page photo of Teele's body lying in a pool of blood on the lobby floor. Fiedler said the photo was an ''essential element'' to the reporting of the story.

''[DeFede] probably shouldn't have done what he did, but The Herald overreacted,'' said Terence Macauliffe of Miami.

Several readers said they would protest the firing. Sean Atkinson of Hollywood was one. ''I cannot believe that you would fire the one man that has raised the standard of your publication,'' he said. ``I will be canceling my subscription till Jim DeFede is back.''

Herald staff writer Susannah A. Nesmith contributed to this report.