What Law Is This? It's Not Godwin's Law. It's Not Gresham's Law. But It Is Somebody's...

Joseph Nocera once again proves that all columns accusing others of engaging in breaches of ethical conduct will themselves be a breach of ethical conduct--in this case, Joseph Nocera's breach.

Seems to me that there is not "the appearance of a conflict of interest" here. Seems to me that Nocera has a genuine conflict of interest here...

We pick up the story at TalkingBizNews:

NYT columnist Nocera adds conflict note to Saturday column: New York Times business columnist Joe Nocera, who wrote his Saturday column about the new Hewlett Packard CEO and his involvement in an intellectual property theft lawsuit, has had to add an editor’s note to the column on Tuesday. The reason? His fiancee is director of communications for the law firm that is involved in suing the CEO.

The editor’s note states:

In the Talking Business column in Business Day on Saturday, Joe Nocera wrote about a lawsuit by Oracle against a division of SAP, claiming theft of intellectual property. Mr. Nocera learned after the column was published  that Oracle was represented by the law firm of Boies, Schiller & Flexner, where his fiancée works as director of communications. To avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, Mr. Nocera would not have written about the case if he had known of the law firm’s involvement.

John Paczkowski of All Things Digital writes:

Odd to learn that Nocera, the Times’ star business columnist, was unaware that his own fiancée was a flak for the law firm repping Oracle in the suit (see screenshot above) that provided so much of the subject matter for his column. But it seems he was not, up to today, when he made a CNBC appearance on the subject...

We continue the story with John Paczkowski:

HP Scandal Sucks in New York Times Columnist Over Conflict of Interest: Another reputation smeared in the Hewlett-Packard/Oracle slag-fest. Turns out Joe Nocera... penned that scathing piece on former SAP chief and incoming Hewlett-Packard (HP) CEO Léo Apotheker... has a conflict of interest. Nocera’s fiancée, Dawn Schneider, is director of communications for Boies, Schiller & Flexner, the law firm that just so happens to represent Oracle in its very same suit against SAP...

And Joe Nocera:

Talking Business: For H.P. Board, a Double Standard: And so it came to pass that on the 55th day — 55 days, that is, after firing its chief executive, Mark V. Hurd, for playing footsie with a consultant and fudging his expense accounts — the board of directors at Hewlett-Packard proudly announced it had found a new man to lead the company out of the wilderness. His name is Léo Apotheker, a suave European — how many American C.E.O.’s have an accent aigu in their name? — who had spent most of his career at SAP, the giant German maker of business software. SAP has one primary competitor: Oracle, the very same company that hired Mr. Hurd barely a month after H.P. let him go, in a move clearly intended not only to bolster Oracle but to humiliate H.P....

There were other things about the appointment that seemed a bit odd.... [H]aving written two unflattering columns recently about the H.P. board, I was inclined to take a pass on Mr. Apotheker’s hiring. But then I learned something about him that caused me to shake my head in disbelief. Next month, Oracle and SAP are scheduled to go to trial in a case involving the wholesale theft of Oracle’s intellectual property by an SAP division. SAP has acknowledged its guilt; the only issue being litigated is the size of the damages. (Oracle is asking for $2 billion; SAP says it should have to pay only “tens of millions” of dollars.) As a member of SAP’s executive board, Mr. Apotheker clearly knew about the theft.

It takes your breath away, really: the same board that viewed Mr. Hurd’s minor expense account shenanigans as intolerable has chosen as its new C.E.O. someone involved — however tangentially — with the most serious business crime you can commit. If it were anybody besides the H.P. directors, the situation would be unbelievable. With these guys, though, it’s all too believable...