Protecting Your Sources
By Neil Dodds
04 May, 2006
Opening the media to the scrutiny of bloggers, citizen journalists and activists means that members of the public can judge for themselves how a story was uncovered, how it developed and what lessons can be learnt from it. However, one effect of total news transparency would threaten the basis of investigative journalism - protecting anonymous sources.
Investigative reporter Mick Smith famously destroyed a collection of Downing Street Memos related to the Iraq war rather than have his unnamed source exposed. Writing in The Times (UK) he claims that the US authorities and their supporters hope to crack down on the use of unnamed sources by reporters - and to do so, are suggesting that anyone unwilling to put their name to a leak is an unreliable source.
"The very opposite is the truth," he writes, "The sources who provide information in the murky world of intelligence and defence are putting their careers, their reputations and very often their pensions at risk. They don’t do it lightly. They do it because they believe that something is going wrong and it needs to be addressed.
"They are of course grown-ups, who are not being forced to give up the information, but as journalists we owe them strict confidentiality. That not only means that we don’t give up their names, whatever the pressure, but also that we do not write our stories in a way that might lead the authorities to find them."
Smith refers to a US incident, when the CIA reportedly subjected all staff who might have had contact with a reporter to a lie detector test. Dana Priest, of the Washington Post, was investigating rumours of secret CIA prisons for terror suspects in Europe - she won the Pulitzer Prize for her work, but her alleged source, Mary McCarthy, was sacked following an internal investigation.
Smith himself came under pressure to reveal his source when he published reports from British government discussions alleging that during the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, the intelligence community was coming under pressure to fit its evidence to the government's demands. Some bloggers, he writes, claimed the "Downing Street Memo" never existed, or was a fraud. Smith, however, says that the documents - including letters to Prime Minister Tony Blair - were authenticated by The Washington Post, the LA Times and the Associated Press, as well as the UK's Daily Telegraph, who published several of them, once any identifying marks that might have led to the source being tracked down were removed.
Smith's critics claim that by burning the original documents (he kept untraceable copies), there is no independent way of verifying the Downing Street Memos. It's the journalist's word against the authorities, even with the support of several respected newspapers. The invasion of Iraq was the most controversial political issue of the past decade, at least - campaigning journalists with a political agenda might be more likely to be taken in by hoaxes or worse, fabricate material to fit their own agenda.
Smith argues, however, that a system of checks and balances exists to ensure that source material is reliable. Additionally, governments should be able to prove that some claims are faked - a witch hunt for leaks doesn't exactly instill faith in the authorities' committment to press freedom.
"When an unnamed source appears it is there not to hide the truth", Smith concludes, "It is there so that you the reader can get to the real truth, rather than the doctored “truth” that those in government would too often prefer that you read. There will be those who say that these sources are breaking the law, that leaking secrets puts lives at danger. I don’t defend leaks that endanger lives and I would not write anything that did put lives at risk.
"(...)The unnamed source who exposes such things does far more for society, and for democracy, than those more timid souls who stay quiet."
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