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This is a very serious situation for a Washington DC journalist. This person graduated from U.Texas at Austin journalism school in 2001, where she was a senior reporter and deputy news editor at the student newspaper, The Daily Texan. Then she interned for the Houston Chronicle for a year. After that she had minor job in Washington DC, and for the last two years or so has been at the Congressional Quarterly. She is on her way up. For journalists, the "big city" is Washington DC, and that's where she wants to be.
Her job is the Congressional beat. Congress wants to know that the reporters who have the easiest access are of professional caliber. To assure Congress that this is the case, a system was set up whereby selected journalists from a cross-section of major media form a standing committee. This committee decides who gets gallery press passes. She has a gallery press pass.
One thing that a professional journalist must always do is properly and completely identify themselves to those they interview, before the interview starts. I think it is safe to assume that her employer does not know that she became an anonymous administrator on Wikipedia last September. It's also safe to assume that she did not inform the standing committee that her gallery press pass application needed to be modified when she became active on Wikipedia.
On Wikipedia, she was making edits on articles about Congresspeople, and about Congressional politics and political issues. Wikipedia is arguably much more influential than the Congressional Quarterly, even though CQ has a good reputation. Anonymous administrators at Wikipedia have tremendous power to shape the content of articles.
It is clear to me that she should have identified herself as an administrator at Wikipedia to everyone in Washington DC that she came in contact with professionally. Her position at Wikipedia was an obvious conflict of interest to the extent that it was not disclosed.
I don't plan to pursue this at this particular time. I'm not a professional journalist, and while I understand their concerns, I'm not particularly incensed. But some journalists, fearing that ethics scandals like this need to be dealt with speedily in order to preserve what access they currently enjoy in the halls of Congress, may feel differently.
What incenses me are the reactions from Wikipedians over this. You have a high-school student, Jaranda, saying that he was "harassed and blackmailed by that idiot Brandt a few weeks ago," a FeloniosMonk implying that I'm a "professional victim" with a "goon squad," and someone named Cool_Cat who doesn't understand why "Katefan0" decided to quit Wikipedia, and why she allows me to "intimidate" her.
What a tiny, tiny world they live in at Wikipedia. They really don't understand that there's a big world out there, and they cannot get away with playing the same kind of games in that big world, that they get away with on Wikipedia.
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Professional journalist is an anonymous admin
