Lee ethics: an oxymoron?

From the e-mail:

I ask you keep my name and location out of this for obvious reasons, but you could identify me (if you must) as a Lee newspaper employee...
In your April 16 post, you said the other anonymous poster was correct and that Lee has an ethics policy in its "Principles for Quality Journalism." That is very nice, but it is not an ethics policy. It's a mission statement.
If you review some other newspaper ethics policies available online, you'll see that they are strict personnel policies that -- for editorial personnel --govern how they conduct themselves. Ethics policies are hard rules on issues like conflicts of interest, acceptance of gifts, travel expenses and the like from potential news sources, etc. They generally carry severe penalties, including dismissal, for violations. Here is the San Jose Mercury News policy:
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/contact_us/about/9723906.htm
for an example; it the first one that Googled up. Lee has nothing like that.
Right now, if I were a Lee reporter, I could be a member of an organization, report on that organization, and violate no company policy. I could be a stockholder in a corporation and write editorial praising that corporation. Furthermore, there is no Lee policy requiring that those relationships be disclosed to readers.
Here's one line from Lee's "Principles for Quality Journalism":
Employees shall "Play a leadership role and be a force for change in the community through coverage, editorials and civic involvement."
Lee strongly encourages middle management editorial employees to join local civic organizations and then allows those same employees to contribute to and even to author news coverage and editorials of those same organizations without disclosure to readers. That violates most other newspapers' ethics policies, and it leads to biased coverage.
I sorta expect publishers to have such community ties, but publishers don't put out the paper every day and good publishers don't insert their biases into local coverage. Lee is unusual in promoting such conflicts among its grunts in the editorial trenches.
Anyway, I've said my piece. I'm glad you're offering a forum for this discussion. I've been fighting over these issues here for years.