One question many of us seem to ask around here is "what is journalism?" We all seem to know what it is not, but do we really? I think we can easily tell the difference between good journalism (probing questions and analysis of facts) and bad journalism (stenography and false equivalency). This gives rise to another important question: What ethical duties do journalists owe, especially in the context of national security?
I attended a legal seminar sponsored by the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law yesterday at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Among the topics discussed was journalistic ethics. The panel was excellent, and included members with journalism, academic and legal backgrounds. One of the case studies they used was that of Edward Snowden. Stay with me after the fold for summary and analysis.
The panel first tried to define the term "journalist." One panelist (who was both a lawyer and a journalism professor) offered this:
Someone who collects information with the intent to disseminate it to the public.
The other panelists seemed to think that definition was too broad, and noted that there is a difference between a document dump and journalism. Journalism, they argued, required that the information be cross referenced and vetted for accuracy and context. The panelist who offered her definition above unequivocally answered "yes" to the question of whether Snowden was a journalist. Others disagreed. This conflict on the panel raised a further question: In the age of self publication and the internet, who is a journalist and what are their ethical responsibilities?
Although the panel was not unanimous, the general feel from the panel was that the journalist has an obligation to get the story right. But more importantly, from an ethical perspective, the journalist must evaluate the information and determine the potential harm publication might cause. Thus, there is a balancing test where the public interest is on one side of the scale and the harm is on the other. Making the balancing task even more difficult is whether the journalist can mitigate some of the harm by keeping sources confidential or by redacting names, for example.
Discussing the idea of harm brought the panel to the issue of government secrets and national security interests. First of all, the panel acknowledged that governments at all levels over-classify documents and information, whether it is the municipal zoning board or the federal government. Journalists push back against this proclivity, and sometimes err on the side of over-disclosure. One panelist asserted that it is not the journalist's role to self-censor, but rather it is up to the government to keep its secrets. Thus, when leaks occur, transparency is the better option for the journalist. She viewed the role of the media as keeping the government honest. She specifically cited the Pentagon Papers Supreme Court case to back up her position.
Other panelists put more emphasis on the journalist's obligation to disclose the truth and balance the harm against the disclosure. For example, one panelist cited the Washington Post's policy of vetting government leaks with people in the government to help them determine whether to publish certain information. The obvious down side to this policy can be seen in the mainstream media's bias toward the status quo in order to preserve access to news sources. They identified categories of governmental information to put the public interest/potential harm conflict into context: 1) clearly illegal activity; 2) state secrets; 3) information of unknown legal status; and 4) legal, but embarrassing. Moreover, the journalist must recognize that what he or she does actually causes harm and that harm should be minimized wherever possible. Sometimes, the harm cannot be mitigated and is sufficiently great that the information should not be published, e.g. troop location and movement. Thus, the journalistic rule of ethics is: The story must be true and the public interest in knowing is greater than the harm that would be caused by disclosure.
But who makes the determination about the harm? As I noted before, the Washington Post has a policy of vetting its stories with the government to help it make that judgment. Here, the panel was unanimous -- the journalists should make the call. As one panelists put it:
Journalists don't want to harm the country. They are citizens first and journalists second."
In essence, we should trust them to make the right call.
Finally, the panel discussed the Obama Administration's proclivity for prosecuting leaks. Asked whether journalists or publishers should ever be prosecuted for publishing leaks, one panelist said, "No. Never." She discussed the First Amendment freedom of the press in light of the Pentagon Papers case and concluded that even if the government could legally prosecute, it wisely has not for fear of establishing bad precedent. But here, again, the panel distinguished journalists and publishers from the leakers.
So we have come full circle. It is my conclusion after the hour of panel discussion that Snowden is not a journalist and therefore had no journalistic ethical obligations when he published the information they he took because it was a "document dump" and not actual journalism. Journalism requires effort. It requires diligence. It requires thought. And it requires ethics. It was not up to Snowden to evaluate the potential harm of his actions, nor was it his responsibility to evaluate the public interest. That duty fell to Glenn Greenwald and the Washington Post. I won't speculate on whether they discharged their ethical duties sufficiently, but I will say that they came to slightly different conclusions about what was necessary to satisfy those responsibilities. In the larger context, however, in an age where literally anyone can commit random acts of journalism, ethics is for everyone.