Thursday, December 01, 2005

Moral and/or legal dilemma

Let's say a Wall Street Journal reporter knows the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, but refuses to divulge that information in order to protect her confidential source.

Can she be jailed? Or should we just throw up our hands and say "Oh well, she's protecting a confidential source. The sanctity of the press must be maintained!"

Maybe this is a bit too close to the decision edge to call correctly. So let's say, instead, that she knows the code which will, via remote control, disable atomic bombs set to go off in 100 American cities at noon today. Can steps be taken to coerce her to divulge that code?

Believe it or not, some people I wrestle with on a closed newsgroup on a daily basis are actually holding forth with the idea that we can't - and shouldn't - do anything.

1 comment:

Eman said...

I might suggest a better hypothetical to be the case in which the reporter claims to know the IDENTITY of a person who claims to know the "magic code." If I understand it correctly, reporter's privilege is generally understood to relate to the protection of an informant's identity rather than the information provided by that informant.

Under that hypo, assume that a reporter claims to know the identity of a person who claims to know the "magic code." In this case, there's no longer a direct link between "reporter talks" and "millions of lives saved." The reporter may be mistaken. The source may not be available. The source may have been lying. The source may have been honest but mistaken. The source could lie now as to what he knows.

Even then, we might determine that the possibility of saving millions of lives may outweigh the countervailing principle in this particular case.

For a more realistic example, suppose a reporter quotes an anonymous source for the proposition that a local chemical plant is dumping a hazardous chemical into a local water source, potentially causing hundreds of deaths. In this case, we may also decide to abolish the confidentiality of the source. If we do so, however, we have to understand that we can only do so a few times before "anonymous sources" and their (at least perceived) benefits become a thing of the past. In our quest for more golden eggs, we may be killing the goose.