Reporter squeals on colleague to her police-chief husband; police seize newspaper computer

A reporter for the New Castle (Pa.) News is married to the police chief. She heard that another reporter had recorded a telephone conversation with her husband, which in Pennsylvania requires the consent of both parties. After she told him, "Police made an unannounced visit to the newspaper and took a computer and some recording devices," reports Jim Romenesko in his digest of journalism news for The Poynter Institute.

The News reports today: "The New Castle News announced today it will file a court protest against the unannounced seizure by authorities of a newsroom computer that police say was used to illegally record phone conversations with two local public officials about a proposed police training facility. The News’ petition will ask that the city police department return the computer immediately, saying it is important to the daily production of the paper and could be subject to indiscriminate search of sensitive news files."

The reporters are Pat Litowitz and Debbie Wachter Morris, whose husband is Northwest Lawrence Regional Police Chief Jim Morris. "Chief Morris declined to say why he pursued the case against Litowitz and whether he considered their conversation to be off the record," the News reports. "His wife said that he previously had asked her to inform him if she ever learned that he had been recorded without his knowledge."

The story quotes Wachter Morris as saying she had no conflict of interest: " I felt if my husband was the victim of an alleged crime, and I was seeing it happen, I felt obligated to bring it to the attention of my employer and my husband as the victim." The story also explains why Litowitz tapes conversations: for accuracy.

The un-bylined story also reports, "Even if the phone conversation was taped, any public official speaking with a reporter has no reasonable expectation of privacy. Beyond that, we are confident that case law holds this particular statute to be so overly broad that it is unenforceable. . . . The seizure of the computer represents a dangerous intrusion by police to some very profoundly held First Amendment issues." Sounds to us like some journalism ethics and management issues are in play, too. Romenesko's headline is "What can happen when a cop's spouse works at a newspaper."