Two Fox reporters got engaged to congressmen. How do you balance love and objectivity?

Boston Globe

16-07-2025

Heinrich is the senior White House correspondent for Fox News and a rising star at the network. She and Fitzpatrick have been dating for four years — but before their first date, she consulted her bosses and got the go-ahead, with the proviso that she steer clear of any stories that involve him in any way.
Singman covers the White House for Fox News Digital and makes occasional on-air appearances. She met Reschenthaler last year while covering the 2024 presidential election, and the two began dating shortly after his divorce: In January, what she thought was an interview turned out to be their first date. The company requires that she recuse herself from covering the House of Representatives.
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'FOX News has policies in place to ensure there are no conflicts of interest between our journalists and the stories or subjects they cover,' the network said in a statement to The Washington Post.
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Senior White House Correspondent for Fox News Jacqui Heinrich at a White House press briefing in March.
MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images
Journalists and politicians have been falling in love for decades. The journalists are usually (but not always) women who meet their future spouses while covering campaigns and politics and find they have common interests, friends and ambition.
Jacqueline Bouvier was a newspaper photographer in Washington when she met John F. Kennedy, in 1952. Maria Shriver married Arnold Schwarzenegger when she was a broadcast journalist and he was a Hollywood star. Andrea Mitchell wed Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, and Claire Shipman reported for ABC News while her husband, Jay Carney, served as President Barack Obama's White House press secretary.
A few prominent male journalists have married political figures: Chuck Todd, of NBC fame, and Democratic political consultant Kristian Denny Todd; Matthew Cooper, known for his work with Time magazine, and Mandy Grunwald, a close adviser to Hillary Clinton; and political correspondent Todd Purdum and Dee Dee Myers, a former
White House press secretary for Bill Clinton.
They were A-list Washington power couples but also faced allegations that politicians inevitably share sensitive information at home, or that journalists used their influence to support and advance their spouse.
'Dee Dee and I only started dating after she had left the White House, and I don't believe our relationship ever posed a substantive conflict of interest,' Purdum said this week. 'But there were certainly media critics who believed it created a perception problem — something that I think we were both sensitive to and respectful of, and worked hard to avoid.'
Former CNN reporter Campbell Brown had a similar experience. 'The degree to which my husband and I agree-or influence one another-is really less the issue than the disclosure,' she wrote in Slate. At the time, her husband, Dan Senor, was an adviser to Mitt Romney. 'Failing to disclose gives your intellectual opponents a means of distraction, a way to create a diversion so that your arguments go unheard.'
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Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Connie Schultz took a leave from Cleveland's Plain Dealer when husband Sherrod Brown ran for Senate in 2006. 'I still want to write about what's on my mind, but that is becoming increasingly difficult,' she wrote at the time. 'Each passing week brings more limitations in my choice of topics because there is a concern that some will accuse me of using my column to stump for my husband.'
President John F. Kennedy with first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, leaving a Newport, R.I., church after their wedding in September 1953. Jacqueline was a newspaper photographer in Washington when she met the late president in 1952.
ASSOCIATED PRESS/Associated Press
On election night, Hillary Clinton called the senator-elect and told him: 'Tell Connie not to let anyone tell her she can't have her career.' Schultz returned to the paper but resigned in 2011 — citing conflict of interest — when her husband launched his reelection campaign. 'In recent weeks, it has become painfully clear that my independence, professionally and personally, is possible only if I'm no longer writing for the newspaper that covers my husband's Senate race on a daily basis,' she wrote.
Mitchell had a celebrated career at NBC as a foreign affairs and political correspondent long before she started dating Greenspan. When he was named Fed chair, in 1987, she knew she had to set boundaries. She 'immediately, of course, went to my bureau chief and said, 'We have to figure out the rules of the road and put up the fire walls.' And I stopped covering anything in the economic arena,' she told 'Fresh Air' in 2019. The couple married in 1997, and his term ended in 2006, but things got complicated during the 2008 economic crisis. Every political story had an economic angle; Mitchell was accused of downplaying her husband's role in the resulting instability.
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Mitchell is still working for the network. Shriver, famously a member of the Kennedy dynasty, is back at NBC after years of putting her career on hold. In her new memoir, 'I Am Maria,' Shriver writes: 'Fast-forward to 2003 and kapow! My movie-star husband abruptly decided he wanted to run for governor of California. And then before I knew what hit me, my network news bosses called to ask me for my resignation, because they said my having a politician for a husband gave the appearance of a conflict of interest.'
Some things have changed over the past two decades. The journalists are now often bigger stars than their political spouses
and make more money. The career of NPR's Nina Totenberg eclipsed that of her first husband, one-term U.S. senator Floyd Haskell. Totenberg was already an established court reporter and married Haskell just after he left the Senate, so the ethical conflicts were minimal.
Another change: the accession of President Donald Trump, the distrust of legacy media, and the blurred lines between traditional journalists and media cheerleaders, some of whom have joined his administration. His daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, interviewed the president Saturday on her weekly Fox News show.
Heinrich and Singman are both part of the news division at Fox News, which is separate from the more partisan opinion lineup, so they are restricted from airing their political views. And while their relationships prompted limits to what they write about, the White House beat can inevitably overlap with covering Congress.
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What happens next? Two weddings — and then another Washington experiment in love, success and objectivity.