Thought For The Day

Toronto Star has a regular item in the editorial section called "Worth Repeating" which is almost invariably a crock of shit. This piece (originally from The Hamilton Spectator) is a prime exmaple. It put me in the mood for a fisking. And so, here is my first attempt at this 2001st century artform:

Protecting sources a fundamental right

I always get suspicious whenever the words "fundamental right" come up in the headlines of a left-leaning paper. A right is a protection under the law granted to all citizens. Any "right" granted to a select group of citizens and denied to the rest is inherently not a right but a privilege. Too often our friends on the Left get these two terms confused. And this case is no exception.

Spectator reporter Ken Peters has kept his word and protected the identity of a confidential source.

Well bully for him.

In doing so, Peters has reaffirmed the principle that protecting confidential sources is fundamental to freedom of the press. It is also a fundamental component of our integrity as a newspaper and a profession and it is critical to our ability to maintain the public trust.

Whoa, hold on there. Freedom of the Press is the right to express your views in the medium of your choice without government interference. There is no implied right to anonymity there, either for you or your sources. Furthermore, I suggest the "integrity" of the news media is entirely subjective. Anchors, journalists and their editors are free to choose the topics they report on. There is no requirement that they cover all of the news, or that they include all of the facts they uncover during the course of their investigations. An otherwise uninformed reader has no way to determine that the facts that are being presented in a given piece are true, or that all of the relevant facts have been presented in a fair and unbiased manner. This is true even for stories written without secretive sources. There is never a guarantee of integrity.

Peters wrote a series of newspaper stories in 1995 based on sensitive documents leaked to him. He was subpoenaed to testify in a $15.5-million civil suit launched by St. Elizabeth Villa, a Hamilton retirement home, against the former region of Hamilton-Wentworth, the city of Hamilton and public officials.

Last week, he was ordered by the trial judge to identify one of two people in a 1995 meeting at which he was handed the sensitive documents. He refused, testifying that doing so would ultimately reveal the identity of his source. He was cited for contempt of court. He could face a fine or jail term.

I admire his convictions. The world is made a better place by people who stand up for their beliefs. It is made better still by people who are willing to be knocked down for them. Throw him in jail.

It is the kind of tough situation journalists can face in doing their jobs — the sort of decision we in the media hope we never have to make. But we know we may face such a dilemma at any time. And we know that those to whom we promise confidentiality rely on us to keep our word.

Those who put themselves at risk by providing news organizations with information we wouldn't otherwise obtain must be able to count on our promise to protect their identity. Without that fundamental trust, the media would often find themselves hamstrung in trying to fulfill a function as watchdogs on behalf of the broader community.

No one appointed the media to be watchdogs for the greater public good. Freedom of the press extends to all individuals, not just j-school graduates. News organisations are in the business of providing news. They don't do it for free. To suggest that their business is so important that it trumps the justice system is ridiculous. Which truth should have the public trust in regard to integrity: a subjective truth parcelized for mass consumption by a for-profit media concern, or a truth arrived at under strict legal guidelines in a court of law?

(And anyone who even thinks of writing that the CBC is not a for-profit organisation and is therefore impartial, I have two words for you: fuck off. Anyone who has compared what the CBC chooses to report versus the overall facts of any given story knows how partisan the CBC can be. (The Grandmere Inn? What dat?) Besides, their raison d'etre is to provide content that couldn't feasibly be provided by a private broadcaster. With so many dedicated news channels in existence, that surely ain't the news.)

The decision to enter into a confidentiality agreement with a source is not made lightly. It is a step taken on issues of high public interest, when declining to promise confidentiality could prevent critical information from ever becoming public. Important stories could not be told.

The public's right to know is paramount and must be protected. To protect that right to know, the media's constitutionally entrenched right to gather and disseminate information must also be protected. Sometimes protecting those rights falls on the shoulders of an individual journalist.

"Freedom of the Press" is a freedom extended to the speaker, not the listener. There is no such thing as "the public's right to know", any more than there is "the right not to have to hear something I don't like". (That some people are in favour of curtailing free speech on this premise is a rant for another day.) And again, the right "to gather and disseminate information" is not in question; what is in question is the right to withhold the identity of the source of that information, which has no constitutional protection. To suggest that a denial of the latter right is a denial of both is just plain wrong and misleading, which is ironic, being in a piece about journalistic integrity.

The decision Peters made in court was his own to make. He has the full support of The Hamilton Spectator in the position he has taken on this issue that is so fundamental to the integrity of journalism.

(As an aside, I find it interesting that the second sentence offers support that the first sentence implicitly denies. Misleading? No, chock full of journalistic integrity.)

We are proud of his stand and of what it says about our profession.

Public trust is given to a newspaper or TV news program based on it's ability to professionally deliver information. This trust is something that is earned or lost based on a track record of accuracy, and cannot be guarranteed by giving special privileges to a small group of professionals. For all of the reasons I've stated above, I feel it is important that we resist the drive to have this privelege codified into law.