Last Updated: May 20, 1999
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Mortification
A journalist’s sense of right and wrong with the story’s
stakeholders should prevail; in the case of shady sources, public interest
and potential harm are the questions to ask
By Joe Davidson
Sometimes ethical questions have easy answers.
Is it OK to steal a sealed court document? The answer is “No.” Is it
OK to tap into a voice mail system, as a Cincinnati Enquirer reporter is
accused of doing in the Chiquita Banana case? Again, the answer is
“No.”
But what should journalists do when they are in a position to obtain
information that someone else may have secured through questionable means?
Is this the same as receiving stolen property, which is a crime? If you
knowingly accept a hot necklace, you can go to jail. Yet, if you get hot
information, you may get a good scoop.
These issues often have no easy answers. In fact, instead of finding
any one set of answers to questions of this type, there is a process of
searching for a set of values that guide journalists. At the heart of those
values is the integrity of the individual, the news organization and the
profession. During this period of increased scrutiny of journalistic ethics,
it is useful to examine situations where the ethical decisions have been
questioned.
A reporter for the Morning Star in Wilmington, N.C. was found guilty
of federal criminal and civil contempt charges after a court worker gave
her an officially sealed court document by mistake. Reporter Kirsten Mitchell
testified a sticker with the word “opened” was on the back on the envelope.
Mitchell said she saw the words “to be opened only by the court” on the
front, only after she had replaced the paper and turned the envelope over.
The information she got from the document was used to confirm what another
reporter had already learned.
The newspaper, which was found guilty of civil contempt in the case,
stands solidly with its reporter. “There was no gray area,” said John Myer,
managing editor. He said the reporters did what they were supposed to do.
“We broke no laws and we violated no court orders,” he added. The verdicts
are being appealed.
A second case indirectly involves journalists who printed transcripts
of an illegally taped a telephone conversation involving Republican leaders
including House Speaker Newt Gingrich and U.S. Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio).
Two Democratic activists in Florida recorded the conversation and gave
the tape to U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.).
Boehner sued McDermott for violating Boehner’s privacy by giving copies
of the tape to reporters. A federal judge dismissed the suit, ruling McDermott
obtained the tapes legally, even though those who recorded the conversation
did so unlawfully.
These two cases demonstrate the tricky situations journalists face once
they go beyond press-release reporting. Bob Steele, director of the ethics
program at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, says journalists should
be guided by weighing “the competing principles of truth telling and minimizing
harm” to stakeholders in the story.
Information obtained from a questionable source must meet a very high
threshold of importance and not be available through less onerous means,
he said. He encouraged reporters and editors to ask, “what is the potential
harm that might occur” from using the information.
While specific ethical issues need to be weighed in each case, the bottom
line for a number of editors is the value of the information, as long as
it was not obtained illegally. Editors cite the Pentagon Papers case as
the defining example. “If the reporter got it through legal means and there
was a public interest in knowing (the information), I would not have a
problem,” said Nancy Hicks Maynard, director of The Economics of News Project.
Les Payne, an assistant managing editor at Newsday, Melville, N.Y.,
agreed: “As editors, we tend to be more concerned about the authenticity
and accuracy of printed documents, and their verifiability, and less concerned
with where they came from.” The same legal restraints that prohibit prosecutors
from using the sweet fruit of a poisoned tree, he added, do not apply to
journalists.
Davidson, a journalism professor at Howard University, is a consultant
on writing, reporting and ethics. He was a reporter for The Wall Street
Journal for 13 years.
