Gifts, Travel & Political Activity Policy

The Massachusetts Times · Published by The Massachusetts Times Company · massachusettstimes.us/policies/gifts-travel-political · Effective October 16, 2026

The Integrity Policy states the principle: nothing of value from the subjects of our coverage. This page is the routed depth — gifts, travel, events, and the politics of the people who make the pages. Every sentence here is kept today.

1. The Principle

1.1. Independence is not for rent at any denomination. The gift's size is not the test; the giver's relationship to our coverage is, and the smallest courtesy from a covered hand is still a wire into the work.

2. Gifts

2.1. Nothing of value is accepted from subjects of coverage or seekers of it. The trivial and human is not a gift: hospitality consumed in the moment at the table where the work happens — the cup of coffee the Source Terms already blessed — is the craft's ordinary courtesy.

2.2. Anything beyond it is declined or returned; where return is impractical, it is donated and the sender told. No drawer at this desk holds a covered party's generosity.

2.3. Materials necessary to review work — the book, the recording, the access to the thing being judged — are working materials, not payment. Where the subject supplied them, the work says so, and the judgment is unbought either way.

3. Travel

3.1. We pay our own way. Transport, lodging, and meals on assignment are this publication's cost, always — the junket, the subsidized tour, and the sponsor's airfare are declined with thanks and without exception made for prestige.

3.2. The one named exception is the seat money cannot buy: pool and embed transport — the military aircraft, the official vessel, the only vehicle into the place — where no commercial alternative exists. It is accepted as access, not hospitality, and disclosed on the work it carried.

4. Events and Access

4.1. Admission to cover an event is access, not a gift: the press seat exists so the public can attend through us, and we take it as a working seat.

4.2. Tickets beyond the working seat, hospitality suites, the gala's open bar as a guest rather than a reporter — declined. Paid speaking for covered institutions is already refused under the Conflicts of Interest Policy, and this page changes nothing about it.

5. Political Activity

5.1. Voting is private and untouchable, as the Conflicts of Interest Policy states. Nothing on this page reaches the ballot.

5.2. Beyond the ballot, the news function stays out of the arena it referees: no campaign contributions, no public campaigning, no candidate's button or yard sign attributable to the desk, no petition-signing on contested public questions we may cover, and no run for office while covering one.

5.3. Opinion writers argue in public for a living — their declared positions are their product, labeled under the Editorial Policy, disclosed under the Conflicts of Interest Policy. The bar of 5.2 binds the news function hardest because the news function's product is the absence of a side.

5.4. Families are free people. A spouse's politics, a sibling's campaign, a household's yard sign belong to their owners; where they intersect a beat, the Conflicts of Interest Policy's disclosure and recusal machinery answers, and nothing more is owed.

6. The Institution Itself

6.1. This publication contributes to no campaign, party, or political committee — the giving half of the pair whose selling half the Advertising Policy already refused. We neither sell our pages to politics nor donate our name to it.

6.2. Civic membership in the community is not politics: sponsoring the spelling bee, joining the chamber of local institutions, standing with the town on its uncontested days — all fine, disclosed where coverage touches them. The line is contested public questions, and this institution's name appears on no side of one.

7. Disclosure and the Cure

7.1. The line cases land somewhere: a thing of value that arrives unavoidably, an exception claimed, a courtesy that grew. Each is disclosed to the masthead, logged, and — where it touches a work — stated on the work under the Conflicts of Interest Policy's machinery.

7.2. Failures are handled under the Integrity Policy, in daylight, with the Correction Terms carrying whatever the reader should have known.

8. The Record of This Policy

8.1. This policy is kept in dated versions at its address, so what the hands behind any work could and could not accept can always be checked against the work's date.

This policy is one of the Policies this publication keeps.