More on Journalist Ethics and the New York Daily News

I recently received this email from Daily News reporter Veronika Belenkaya in response to my blog post about her story on the third year Brooklyn Law Student who appeared nude on the Playboy Channel:

I was aware of her boyfriend's involvement. But since at the time the article was going to print I did not have a 100% confirmation on his name or that he was in fact her boyfriend, we made a conscious choice to leave it out until we were sure.

Alright, fine. I think most people wouldn't fault a newspaper for choosing not to identify someone by name without confirming their actual involvement in an incident.

But then I saw this follow-up piece in Wednesday's Daily News. To their credit, the Daily News finally acknowledges the role of Adriana Dominguez's then-boyfriend, Sean Kalish, played in the video. However, the paper once again fails to identify Kalish as a third year Brooklyn law student or raise the possibility of potential character and fitness difficulties. Rather, the only purpose of unmasking Kalish appears to be to use him to attack Dominguez's judgment and question her moral character:

A Brooklyn law student who took it all off for Playboy TV has only herself to blame for the scandal, her ex-boyfriend told the Daily News yesterday.

Adriana Dominguez, who's in her final year at Brooklyn Law School, blabbed about her sexy exploits all around campus, said former flame Sean Kalish.

"She told everyone in school, 'This is what I did, watch this,'" said Kalish, 25, a fellow third-year student at the school.

"She even posted a link to it in her MySpace [online profile]," he said.

...

"She kind of thrives on this kind of drama," he said.

"I wish that Adriana had been a little more discreet about it," Kalish said.

One commenter to the previous post stated that the Daily News's "agenda is simply to sell as many papers as possible and that a news story about an attractive blonde law student appearing in Playboy is going to get more attention than one that talks about a guy in virtually the same situation." Even if this is the Daily News's only motive for running this story the way it did (and I'm not so certain that's the case), can one really argue that the Daily News reporter is engaging in ethical journalism, especially in light of this follow-up article?