The Boston Globe’s Mark Leccese takes issue with Lavender’s recent story outing Pastor Tom Brock in which reporter John Townsend used undercover measures. Lavender has taken some heat from journalists for going under cover to a support group, but earned praise from some quarters of the LGBT community for outing an anti-gay pastor.

“Here we have a single story that violates two ethical principles: gathering information for a story without indentifying yourself as a reporter, and outing a closeted homosexual,” wrote Leccese.

He quotes Jeffrey Seglin who writes a ethics column for the New York Times called “The Right Thing.”

If the reporter posed on someone he is not to get a story, he builds the story based on misrepresentation. He needs to ask himself whether approaching the story by misrepresenting who he is the only way to get the story. If there was a more honest way to get it, he should have gone that route.

He also needs to ask himself if outing a gay pastor because he has made anti-gay comments in the past and presumably appears to be a hypocrite to the reporter is a legitimate stance. Has the reporter never assumed that the pastor may be both a gay man and hold anti-gay sentiments? It seems that in exploring the ethics of this story, the reporter placed an emphasis on outing the pastor without looking at what his (the reporter’s) motivations were for getting the story and whether there were alternatives that he could have used that weren’t deceptive.