CCJ Traveling Curriculum trainer and contributing writer Tracy Thompson is a former Washington Post and Atlanta Journal Constitution reporter and the author of two books:  The Beast: A Journey Through Depression and The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children, and Struggling with Depression. She blogs regularly here.

Whether we’d like to admit it or not, journalists may have something important in common with Republican presidential candidate John McCain: Our confidence in our own integrity can blind us to how we look to the rest of the world.

That’s the position the New York Times unexpectedly found itself in after its story looking into Sen. McCain’s dealings with a Washington lobbyist. A story that looked at first to be about a presidential candidate caught in some kind of illicit relationship with a female lobbyist turned out instead to be a story was about how the senator could sometimes have an amazing blind spot when it came to perceiving how his actions might appear to others.

Yeah, well, there’s a lot of that going around. “I was surprised,” said Times Managing Editor Bill Keller, speaking of the overwhelmingly negative reaction the story got, not just from McCain’s camp and conservatives, but from independents, liberals — and most of the journalism tribe. The Times “went by the book” in making sure the story measured up to the newspaper’s ethical standards, Keller protested, as if that settled things.

But what if your book is written in a language the public doesn’t understand?

That’s the question that came up for me in another context, when I happened on a reference on the Internet to a first-person story by a Washington Post reporter about his struggle to recover from a serious drug addiction. The story, by Ruben Castaneda, had run back in December. In it, Castaneda described how he had come to the Post in August 1989 to be its night cops reporter, only to find himself descending into the snakepit of crack addiction. At work, he covered some of the District’s toughest neighborhoods on the police beat during the worst period of the crack epidemic; in his off hours, he went back to some of those neighborhoods to score drugs for himself. As his addiction intensified, he drained his bank account, borrowed money from friends and maxed out every credit card in his wallet. It was a hole that took him years to dig his way out of.

I was fascinated and appalled because I know Ruben. During the period he wrote about, our paths crossed almost daily in the Post newsroom. I was on Metro’s investigative team (working for Marilyn Thompson, one of the Times reporters who worked on the John McCain story — journalism is such a small world), and I thought of Ruben as a solid, responsible reporter and personally quite a decent guy. I’d had no clue he was in such trouble.

But that was just the first surprise. My second came when I scrolled down to the “comments” section under his story and discovered that many readers — a lot of readers — had leaped on what was to them a glaring conflict of interest: a reporter who covered the police while he was regularly breaking the law by buying illegal drugs.

“By becoming a player in the drug trade while a police reporter, he left, by the Post's own count, hundreds of thousands of daily readers in the position getting their news of the D.C. drug epidemic from a thoroughly compromised and untrustworthy source,” one reader wrote. “I’m old enough to remember the Janet Cooke scandal, and this is just as bad,” wrote another. “Edward R. Murrow must be spinning in his grave.”

Wow. I’d read Ruben’s whole story, and that obvious aspect of the story had never occurred to me. Why not? Here was a tiny little taste of the bewilderment the Times editors must be feeling, I thought: Something that seemed a glaring outrage to the public had been invisible to me. Maybe I could partly attribute that to being distracted by the fact that I knew Ruben, but that didn’t wholly explain it.

On further thought, I realized I’d assumed that Ruben had done the same thing I had done during periods of my career when my own life was falling to pieces: he’d simply become one person at work and another person at home. He’d compartmentalized. Soldiers do this when they come home from a war; doctors do it when they treat noncompliant patients they don’t like; ministers do it when they officiate at a wedding in the morning and a funeral in the afternoon. It can exact a fierce psychological toll, but in the short run it’s perfectly do-able. And in fact when I talked to Ruben, “compartmentalization” was exactly the word he used to describe how he’d managed to lead a double life for so many months before it finally came to the attention of his editors.

The problem is that in journalism, the public finds compartmentalization really hard to believe in. I can see why. Writing is an act of personal expression, even when it’s done in the fairly rigid confines of journalism. Information goes through your eyeballs, into your brain, out your fingers and onto a computer screen, where it’s shared with the world. How can it not be filtered through a writer’s personal experience?

And of course to some extent it is, and that comes out in subtle ways; it explains why, for instance, we see a lot of trend stories about middle-class issues like work-family balance, and very few stories on, say, the history of Levittown architecture or what kind of chewing tobacco is most popular with long-distance truck drivers. Given this reality, which few of us want to talk about, it’s hard for us to explain to readers how we can have political leanings and not let them influence our reporting of a political race (and in fact, I’m in favor of more transparency there). It’s even harder to explain to a non-journalist how a reporter could participate in the drug trade and cover it at the same time.

“Who would I be protecting?” Ruben asked, when I put this question to him. “Drug dealers? Or the cops?” If he’d been the customer of a major drug kingpin, in a position to know things the police wanted to know or to tip off the dealer to what the cops were doing, things would have been different, he said. As it was, he saw no difference between his situation and, say, a cops reporter who had a drinking problem — because, after all, driving while drunk is against the law, too.

Not an exact analogy, I thought, since buying liquor is legal (usually) and buying cocaine is not. But he was right that being an alcoholic can certainly involve breaking the law. Leaving aside for the moment the type of substance being abused, I asked if it occurred to him if he’s ever thought at the time that people might consider his position a conflict of interest?

“No,” he said decisively — not then, and now that the question had been raised, he still didn’t see it that way. “I did my job as best I could. I developed police sources, and if there was a drug murder, I wrote it that way.” Obviously, the situation had been “surreal,” he said, “and I could have been a lot more effective if I had been clean.” But in retrospect, “I don’t see a single [story] in which I was compromised as a reporter.”

“Were you surprised by how many people seized on this issue?” I asked.

“Mildly surprised, I guess.”

“So what did you think about them?”

“I don’t read those comments,” he said. He pays attention to his office e-mail, but he finds anonymous online comments too snarky and mean-spirited to wade through. I could understand that; many of the comments I saw were personal and nasty and added nothing of value to the discussion.

Yet I thought that writing off all those reader comments was a bad idea. Embedded in the nasty-grams were thoughtful posts from people who raised a valid question that merited a thoughtful answer. These were, moreover, very different people from the ones who had e-mailed Ruben personally, so they represented a slice of the Post’s audience who weren’t likely to be heard any other way. (Ruben said that most of his office e-mails “were very supportive.”) Most important, the fact that the questions these readers raised had not occurred to Ruben at the time these events took place, were never raised as an issue by his editors at the Post, and had not occurred to me when I read Ruben’s account — all of that lends powerful credence to the public’s argument that the ethical standards that journalists operate by are pretty inscrutable, which translates to “suspect.”

And they’re right, at least about the first part. Our rules are inscrutable first of all because we don’t bother to re-think whether those standards still make sense. Newspapers like to come up with ethical guidelines that sound like Moses just brought them down from Mt. Sinai. And when those standards are questioned, we haul out our important-looking stone tablets and say, “See? We followed our rules, and you can see how important they are because they are written in stone.” Which is what the Times did on the McCain story, and I can’t see that it did the paper much good.

Is it any wonder, then, that the relationship between the press and the public is so often one of mutual incomprehension? To Bill Keller and the folks at the Times, the McCain story was a nuanced, fair and complete character profile; to everybody outside the building, it looked an awful lot like a story that promised news of some kind of illicit closed-door dealings (possibly sexual), and then failed to deliver. Likewise, to Ruben, his editors — and to me — it seemed perfectly plausible that a reporter could have a drug problem and still, at least for the short term, be an honorable cops reporter; to many members of the public, this whole concept is ludicrous.

I will leave the Times’ problems to other people, but I think I could have answered those public questions about the objectivity of the drug-abusing cops reporter. My answer would have gone something like this:

“It’s perfectly possible to break the law at 10 a.m. and cover law enforcement objectively at 10 p.m., at least for a time. People do this kind of thing all the time. The construction worker with a drinking problem builds with great craftsmanship and saves his binges for the weekend. A doctor treats his patients with skill and compassion, then overeats and smokes cigarettes. The reporter with a serious mental illness such as depression (this would be me I’m talking about, and on more than one occasion) covers complex court proceedings without making a mistake, but goes home and is too depressed to eat or sleep. Human beings are amazing compensators. When your life is in the ditch, your professional identity can be the one thing you hang onto by your fingernails. It’s the last thing to go.”

Ruben could have explained this, too. He might not have convinced everybody, but his story would have been better had he made the attempt. Of course, to do that, he’d have to think of the question. Unfortunately, those of us in the communications business are not always good communicators. We also tend to be more interested in figuring out what makes other people tick than in looking at ourselves.

The more the public understands about how journalists do their jobs, the more they will trust us. It’s as simple as that. It’s not enough to come up with journalistic Rules of the Road and then pride ourselves on how stringently we follow them. That’s like saying you can sail by the book. When the fog hits — when close calls have to be made and you’re called upon to defend those calls — you’re going to hit something.

What you have to do is more or less commit the rulebook to memory — and, having done so, put it down and look around. When you’re sailing in a fog, you have to keep track of a range of hazards that change with time. You have to stay alert. And, more than anything else, you have to make sure you know where you are, and that everybody else knows, too.