Finding Our Way through the Grey

Katie Hendershot

kh679010@ohio.edu

Leaks have the potential to drive media coverage and if the leaks are controversial, sometimes the source of the leak can fall under even more scrutiny than the information leaked.

Journalists will always face questions when considering publishing information based on leaks. Is there a clear-cut decision to all of those questions? Is there always an obvious right and wrong? I don’t think so.

The thing about leaks is that it’s information that someone is trying to hide. What we often see is that it’s information that the government wants to hide, and that’s where things get tricky. Things get messy when you make the government mad. Just ask Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers, and Bradley Manning, who was involved in the WikiLeaks scandal.

National security

Oftentimes the government will cite national security as a reason not to publish important information. They want to keep military tactics under wraps so as not to threaten the troops or the country. That’s fair enough. It’s like when Martin Savidge was speaking to our ethics class on Monday. He mentioned that CNN has a policy about not showing police outside a building where a hostage situation is taking place. That’s important, and I think it’s a good policy to have.

The thing about being an ethical journalist is that we are constantly trying to find a balance. When looking at ethical codes, sometimes, you have to make decisions between two that conflict each other in a particular circumstance. Public trust is a big one. We always want to be credible but we must also be sensitive to unique situations and the impact they could have. Just because we have information in our hands, it doesn’t mean we have to publish it. We have to use our judgment. 

The grey area

Scott Shane, a New York Times national security reporter, was quoted in a Committee to Protect Journalists story as saying “Most people are deterred by those leaks prosecutions. They’re scared to death. There’s a gray zone between classified and unclassified information, and most sources were in that gray zone. Sources are now afraid to enter that gray zone.”

 

Photo by WikiLeaks.com.

Journalists face a lot of gray zones and that’s where we must be ethical and formulate our own personal stance on certain issues, ideally before we face them. It doesn’t help when journalists turn on each other, like David Carr explained in his New York Times article.

What about when the information is just something that the government doesn’t want us to know? Well, the media is often considered to be “the fourth estate.” Therefore, as journalists, it’s our job to keep the government in check, just like the branches of government keep each other in check.

History of leaks

Though we all know the Pentagon Papers and WikiLeaks stories, by no means are those isolated events. Government leaks have been happening for a long time in our history.  Jack Anderson, a former reporter, wrote many columns leaking government information back in the 1970s. His story is similar to the one infiltrating news outlets about Assange. Many similarities exist between their cases, though Assange had the Internet. As one article said, “on the Internet, being homeless means you don’t have to play by anybody’s rules.”

I don’t know if it truly means that there are no rules, but it certainly spreads information faster and further,  proving why we must be careful with the classified information that falls into our hands as journalists.

With leaks of information, a journalist must make many ethical decisions. Sometimes that means publishing it and sometimes that means keeping it under wraps. In the end, it should come down to what’s best for the public. We owe it to them to keep them informed, especially of things that impact them, but we must also keep them safe.