Friday, March 21, 2008
Protecting Your Sources How Far Does it Go ?
So this video shows an interview by a reporter for NYT . This guy has trained hundreds of terrorist by his accounts and carried out attacks himself. Why isn't this guy in jail ? The reporter says they had to conceal their location in order for him to agree to the interview. I suppose a reporter would argue you have to protect your sources but... where is the limit? If I have information about a terrorist who carries out terrorist action am I obligated to pass it onto the state dept ? Or break a big story instead .. Hmmm which sounds more towards the rights of the innocent that will suffer from the attack or the people this guy trained ?
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4 comments:
I intend to go into journalism, and if I ever know where a terrorist is, I'm telling the state department. It doesn't make sense to hide the terrorist. Even though there are ethics that go along with journalism, if someone poses a threat to innocent people, what's the REAL ethical thing to do--hide them or turn them in? It doesn't make sense to hide those that are trying to kill innocent people.
The reporter never would have had the interview if she didn't agree to keep the location confidential. By performing this interview she was able to provide information to the public that they never would have been able to have. This is the responsibility of a journalist. If journalists always tell the government about who is involved and when and where illegal activity occurs journalists won't have interviews like this for very long. I think it is good for the public to have this information provided to them, even if it requires confidentiality on the part of reporters.
In the reading, TCT P.402, it talks about the Algerian massacre by the French. They believed that “the innocent deserve more protection than the guilty.” Or in other words bad guys have less rights so we can do whatever we want to them. If our media ceases to operates on a level of anonymity then we will cease to be informed about what is going on around us. Think about the circumstances we would be in if we had no knowledge of the outside world, while at the same time the world possessed nuclear weapons. Anonymity in journalism provides the medium for world wide communication no matter how bad it makes us, ethically journalists need to maintain that right. If that went out the window what would be next, attorney-client privileges or doctor-patient confidentiality?
I'm not sure attorney/client or doctor/patient privileges would ever disappear in the event that anonymity disappears in journalism. But I think that journalists do have an obligation not to reveal their sources. The information they provide to the public becomes more important than the location of the potential terrorist. If journalists started turning in their sources, no one would talk to them. One interesting thought, in terms of terrorism: if terrorists couldn't trust journalists, how would they get their message out to the public i.e. al Qaeda tapes etc? Maybe it wouldn't be so bad. I'd still rather have journalistic integrity, though.
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