Withholding sensitive information or not (Part 2)

In the beginning of January, BuzzFeed published a document involving unverified accusations against President-elect Trump and Russia. CNN and other news companies were withholding the contents of the memo arguing they could not independently verify the allegations. When publishing the PDF, BuzzFeed acknowledged some misgivings about the document, admitting ‘‘it is not just unconfirmed; includes some clear errors.’’

The discussion resulting from this incident, I thought, is worth taking a closer look at.

The Atlantic argued that even there being no set of rules for when to publish and not to publish a sensitive story, BuzzFeed’s acting ‘‘raised serious questions’’.

Some other journalists and media critics followed this stance saying the company ‘‘crossed a line’’.

‘‘There is a time-honoured rule in journalism that we try to get as close as possible to the truth that we don’t make information dumps of unverified material which that was.’’

‘‘One of the most important principles of American journalism. The one on which the trust of our audience is really based on which is verification.’’

They claim that journalists are supposed to help the reader figure out what is true and what is false, which would actually characterize a journalist’s job. According to them, people sometimes had no chance to distinguish between true and false informations.

Expecting that publishing the memo would be controversial, BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith posted his motives for sharing the document with the public on Twitter: ‘‘Our presumption is to be transparent in our journalism and to share what we have with our readers. We have always erred on the side of publishing.’’

Sounds quite sensible and honorable, doesn’t it?

The document was in wide circulation at the highest levels of American government and media, so why shouldn’t the wider public be allowed to get access to the memo? Smith Buzzfeed’s decision shows their ‘‘respect for the intelligence of the audience’’. He thus opposes to the view that politicians and journalists, say academics, are able to decide themselves how to handle unverified information, the common people are not – which directly makes us think of the currently widely discussed topic of fake news. Those seem to be such a huge issue because the people emphasizing their danger strip the consumers of their ability to judge.

‘‘Publishing the dossier reflects how we see the job of reporters in 2017.”