Should a journalist always tell the truth at the expense of their source?
What i mean is, I watched an episode of law and order in which it’s depicted a journalist conversing with a source telling her truthful information off-the-record. On the record, he told a lie based on the same information. The journalist says the real information. The source is Japanese, so, to preserve his honor, the journalist is going to go on the air and say she made a “mistranslation”. Without sources, journalists cannot work, the honor for the source is more important than her lie. On the other hand, I wonder if journalism is more about protecting the sources than preserving the truth. Could be solved ethically if journalists have attorney-client privilege with their sources, ie they cannot reveal what their sources told them off-the-air.
TL;DR What’s more important: sources or truth? In this case, can it be both? Could the source simply refuse to answer?
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No. If you burn your sources, you will never be trusted again and your credibility and effectiveness as a reporter will be destroyed.
If you want to be a serious journalist, you need to keep secrets.
The journalist promises the source to protect the source’s anonymity, because the source has strong reasons to want/need anonymity, such that they would not tell the journalist the information, otherwise.
The journalist isn’t barred from telling the true information – just from revealing the identity of the source.
So, if the journalist betrays the source by violating their promise and revealing their source, there are multiple consequences, such as:
* The source will not trust the journalist again.
* The source will likely become hostile to the journalist.
* The source may deny it, raising the suggestion that the journalist is lying about their report.
* No one who hears of this will trust that journalist again.
* Other who hear of this may also distrust most/all journalists in the future, and information sources in general may become less and less likely to speak out in any case where they don’t want to be identified.
So, that’s an awful lot of reasons not to do it, and is why there is a code of behavior for journalists about not revealing sources. By having such a code of behavior, the entire profession, and the reading public, all gain, in countless cases, in the long term. Violating it is therefore a big deal, and should be taken as such.
If you tell someone that what they are saying is off the record and then you put it onto the record, you just lied. You can no longer claim the truth.
Keeping source confidential is important for journalism to dig out the facts of stories. If you get information “off the record” you should not use it and, I believe, you could be facing a lawsuit if you did. If it is “off the record” you could use that information to maybe give you an idea of how to proceed on a story without using that person as a source. You could maybe convince that person that going on the record is a necessary thing. There are things that can be done with that information other than publishing it.
Speaking the truth is the definition of Information.
The journalistic goal is to Act in the publics interest and Maintain the publics Trust. That is top priority.
Profit should be beneath this. Unfortunately this has seemed to have changed an profit of supporting various propaganda measures have overtaken the gold standards for Journalism.
Sources of information must trust journalists to protect their identity, where applicable, and not to misrepresent them or their views.
A source is often only such because they believe their information is vital, but their identity is secret.
If they can’t trust the reporter, they won’t cooperate.
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