ABSTRACT
When Bloomberg News got tied up in an insider trading probe in the spring of 2021, with a top deals reporter scrutinized for publishing merger and acquisition scoops closely timed to a source’s stock trades, a fresh round of hand-wringing broke out over the ethically fraught journalist-source relationship in business news. When does source cultivation cross a line? When does trading information become insider trading? Are the rules clear enough? This chapter explores the ethics codes of today’s business news outlets and how they have evolved to address financial conflicts of interest around investing and market trading. The 1984 case of Wall Street Journal columnist R. Foster Winans, who leaked his soon-to-be-published columns to a stock broker in exchange for financial kickbacks, was the journalism industry’s most notorious modern-day insider trading scandal. It spurred newspapers to adopt more stringent ethics procedures and policies. Whether it curbed wrongdoing is another question. This chapter also looks at how insider trading and broader financial conflicts are addressed in media ethics textbooks.
