The Unspoken Obligation
In March, the trial of Reality Leigh Winner will begin. Winner was an intelligence specialist who leaked classified information to the national security outlet The Intercept. The story ran and mere moments later, Winner was arrested, in part due to The Intercept’s carelessness. Winner is being held in prison, twice denied bail. The Intercept received some bad press. This is the way journalism works: We rely on sources to do what we do, but when things go south for them, as journalists we’re largely unaffected. It’s a relationship which is often unbalanced, and, as with any imbalance, it raises ethical questions. But within the modern norms of journalism, they’re under-examined.
As journalists, we believe our craft is in pursuit of a greater good—and when we practice it responsibly, it is. But just because our reporting serves a higher purpose doesn’t mean that the stories we work on can’t inflict collateral damage on the sources on whom we rely. The question of what, if anything, we owe our sources is not well explored, and, as a result, there aren’t strong guidelines for journalists.
Rather, journalism ethics tend to focus on other things, like truthfulness and objectivity. And if we follow these ethical rules—if we are accurate and fair and if our story is for the public good—there is little that compels us to take stock of how our journalism may affect those we write about or depend on for information.
In her 1990 book on journalism ethics, “The Journalist and the Murderer,” Janet Malcolm writes, “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.” It’s not entirely a fair accusation: The best traditions of journalism are not only morally defensible, they are morally necessary. But the idea of betrayal highlights an issue that is conspicuously absent from current discussions of media ethics. As journalists, we have a mission to inform the public—and we also have a mission to protect our sources. These sometimes come into conflict with each other and when they do, the default position tends to be that our mission to inform trumps our mission to protect. But is this a fair assumption? What do we, as journalists and as decent humans, owe the sources and subjects on whom we depend?
In a discussion this summer, Kate Harloe, a 2017 FASPE fellow, summed up a critical idea at the root of this issue: “The raw material of our profession is other people’s lives.” The practice of journalism demands that that we mine others for pieces of information, anecdotes, ideas, and details that we can use to build a story. Ed Wasserman, a media ethicist and the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, where I attend J-school, says he thinks that reality often leads journalists to see sources as a resource, rather than as independent actors who have much to gain or lose from engaging with the media.
“You don’t ask the ore how it feels being processed into gold,” he says.
In the United States, we laud the broad protections of the First Amendment, and we largely feel secure in its ability to defend us as journalists. But our sources—our raw material, our ore—are not considered part of the press and, as such, they remain vulnerable. A reporter may be celebrated for breaking a critical story, and the story’s impact on its sources is accepted as the cost of doing business, if it is examined at all. In the case of “small fish,” we rarely pause to consider the potential fallout they may face from speaking with the press, while bigger sources may be prosecuted or jailed for stories that win reporters accolades.
But the machinery of a story starts long before the presses roll, and if we are interested in acting ethically, we need to consider the reality that our craft inherently depends on human beings who will be affected by the stories we write. The balance between our responsibility to inform the public and our responsibility to protect our sources can shift depending on the information at hand, and to assess this moral calculus, we need to be at least willing to question some of the general practices of journalism.
We tend to assume that sources know the rules we play by. Often, they do. Public relations professionals, government officials, media moguls, and others in this vein are as happy to manipulate us as we are them. But less media-savvy sources have little familiarity with the standards that guide reporting. A journalist approaches a man on the street, identifies herself as a reporter, notebook in hand, and asks for a reaction. If the man starts speaking, journalistic standards allow for the reporter to quote him. But the man may not actually be aware of this—it’s highlighted by the fact that it’s not particularly uncommon for such a source to end an interview by saying, “You can quote me on that,” as if he assumes it were up for debate until that point.
Similarly, we may expect that people know the risks they face when choosing to speak with us. But again, that’s not always the case. Particularly with vulnerable populations, we should consider whether we have a moral burden to more clearly inform them of the rules and risks ahead of time. Levi Bridges, an independent journalist in Mexico, has been working on a story about deported immigrants trying to cross back into the U.S. The people he interviews could be put in danger if they go on the record with him, and he says he’s tried to be cautious when finding sources. He’s been informing people they don’t have to answer questions that make them uncomfortable and he’s clear that talking to a journalist about immigration status could have negative repercussions. To an extent, it flies in the face of the traditional journalistic mandate to get the story, no matter what.
“Oftentimes I feel like I’m trying to convince people not to talk to me, and like this isn’t the best way to start an interview,” he says. “Yet nothing else feels ethically right.”
No one knows what the repercussions of a story will be. A journalist can offer warnings, but he or she cannot offer guarantees, and sources often have their own motivations for speaking to journalists. But particularly when a source is not accustomed to interacting with the media, there exists a power differential between the journalist and the source. In an essay called Truth and Consequences in the Nieman Foundation’s book, “Telling True Stories,” Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo writes, “As a journalist I have more power than the people in my stories. There’s no way around that.” By being more upfront about the rules of the game and potential outcomes, we can at least minimize that power differential.
For another example of rethinking interactions with sources, Wasserman points to a case study that Berkeley students used to discuss during a media ethics class. In the 1980s, a small-town paper in New England ran a story about the first baby born in the new year. The article was intended to be a simple filler-type piece, but it turned out that the mother of this particular baby was on welfare and was a single mother, and she was more than happy to talk about how her reliance on government programs made the decision to have a second child easy. The wires picked up the story, and in the decade of Reagan’s welfare queens, the woman suddenly found herself a poster child for indolence. The public’s reaction was so severe that she ended up too scared to leave her apartment.
The question Wasserman raises is whether the reporter had any responsibility to inform the woman of the repercussions her statements might have. The knee-jerk journalistic reaction is, “Of course not.” As reporters, it sometimes seems as if we live for juicy statements like hers. The topic is not necessarily trivial: Information about the use of tax dollars serves the public interest. But does our mission to inform the public override our responsibility to protect our source—even if we’re protecting her from herself?
Wasserman argues that this dilemma tends to arise particularly when journalists are “driven by genre.” The story in the New England paper was supposed to be a short, light piece, and that’s what it ran as. But the reporter and the editor must have known that it contained questions that were worthy of deeper journalistic pursuit: Was the mother actually abusing the system? Was this a widespread problem? The story didn’t dive into these issues; rather, it just dropped several explosive quotes which, devoid of context, suggested a particular narrative, which was then picked up by cultural commentators to use for their own means.
It’s not a journalistic prerogative to protect sources from themselves if they don’t deserve protection. If the mother had been abusing the welfare system, that would have been worth reporting on, and the story would have been made richer by her colorful quotes. But merely including the quotes in a shorter piece with a different focus suggests a larger story, one that has not been fully reported out.
Of course, there are times when we do report out the full story, which comes with its own calculus, and this brings us back to The Intercept. In this case, the story was inherently worthwhile. The information that Reality Winner leaked was about Russian interference in the 2016 election. There was a clear prerogative to inform the public—though that doesn’t mean that the responsibility to the source was necessarily less. But the particulars of the situation do raise important questions about how we prioritize these competing responsibilities. Winner approached The Intercept with information, rather than The Intercept soliciting her for it. Moreover, she was an intelligence specialist, vetted for a security clearance, and not a random person on the street. We assume—whether rightly, we can’t be sure—that she knew what she was risking. And she did little to protect herself. Winner was one of only six people who had access to the document she leaked, which made her particularly vulnerable, and she used her work computer to communicate with The Intercept.
Still, these factors shouldn’t necessarily absolve us of responsibility. While it is not our role as journalists to assume liability for any source’s decisions, we do need to recognize that sources and reporters enter into agreements with very different things at stake, and it’s not always clear to a source what a promise to protect actually means. The Intercept did not intentionally reveal Winner as the source. She was identified when The Intercept sent copies of the document she leaked to the NSA, and in looking at the copies, the FBI realized that the originals had been creased and thus likely printed and hand-carried, which ultimately led the NSA to Winner. But in a world of increasingly sophisticated surveillance, these reveals are becoming more likely. In 2011, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press wrote that a national security representative told her that they wouldn’t subpoena reporters in the future. “We don’t need to. We know who you’re talking to.”
Given this world, we should ask whether we owe our sources more. Certainly, we should be careful, even obsessive, about our digital security, and The Intercept has been rightfully pilloried for its carelessness in this case. But if sources’ identities can be readily found out, what are we doing by promising not to reveal names, other than advertising our supposed virtue? Should we promise more? Should our relationship with our sources end when we can no longer protect them? Do we owe them a public defense, a recognition that we could not do our work without them? In the absence of a broader ethical discussion about source relations, the answers are unclear. That should trouble us.
