journalists refuse to divulge sources, even upon pain of jail, they are not claiming a special privilege for themselves. Rather they are claiming protection for their sources, and in doing so protecting a wider interest of society.
These were the interests being protected by Deborah Cornwall when she refused to divulge sources to the Independent Commission Against Corruption. Last week Justice Abadee gave her a two-month suspended jail term and 90 hours’ voluntary work for doing so.
He also warned that in future he would not be so lenient. In other words, journalists would be sent to jail _ unlike armed robbers and sexual assaulters who sometimes get bonds for first offences.
It was a harmful and dumb threat. Dumb because it will not make any difference to journalists’ conduct and harmful because it might make some people less likely to take journalists into their confidence, fearing that journalists might succumb to threats like those of Justice Abadee.
A lot of corruption, incompetence and stupidity of governments and people in authority is uncovered because people take journalists, rather than “”the proper authorities” into their confidence. It is almost axiomatic that authorities protect their own and do not weed out the corrupt, incompetent and stupid in their own midst.
The police generally spend their time detecting blue-collar crime. They do a deal of white-collar crime, too, but not all. Quite reasonably, they do virtually no detection of incompetence and stupidity; that is not their role. So their is a wide field of rottenness outside the scope of proper authority. It is left mostly to journalists and to MPs.
Discussions about journalists’ sources invariably cite Watergate, Chelmsford and Queensland-Fitzgerald. And true enough, without the initial journalistic expose those evils would have gone unchecked.
However, it is much wider than that. Literally hundreds of people a year who for very good reason have no faith in the “”official channels” turn to the media to expose what they see as folly, corruption and incompetence. Stories about kick-backs a rubbish tip out west; car-number plates in some state capital; waste in some government office; shonky curtain companies; chemical hazards; lazy water officials and on and on.
Why do they come to journalists? Because they have got nowhere going to the “”proper authorities”, so often cited by judges censuring journalists. Judges presumably rarely witness the incompetence, laziness, uninterestedness and self-interestedness of “”proper authorities” when confronted with a squeaky wheel in their hitherto well-oiled organisation.
Witness just last week naval officer Dr Wheat. Going to the proper authorities got her nowhere. She had to go public to get proper redress.
The other reason people prefer to go to journalists than the authorities is fear of reprisals. A well-founded fear of loss of job is the main reason. Often the first response of internal authorities is to demote, threaten or actually sack the complainant. Often it is the authorities themselves being complained about. So rather than draw the attention of the supervisor of leaking cyanide, or kick-backs in computer contracts or whatever, the complainant goes to the media. There is nowhere else to get a hearing.
Admittedly not all complainants are saints pursuing the public interest. Many, if not most, are venal, self-interested, liars, vendetta-pursuers and plain nutters. Indeed, there are grounds for surmising that one of Cornwall’s sources was a liar pursuing self-interest.
There will be some rare occasions when a journalist should not be held to confidentiality _ usually, when the source has lied or committed a crime, or when continued confidentiality would result in severe risk to life and limb of innocent people. But you have to be sure the public will be convinced of these things, because it is only then that the exposure will not imperil the confidence of future sources in journalists respecting confidentiality.
It is clearly time to clarify those situations and it is time to get rid of present laws that compel journalists on pain of jail to expose sources. I don’t imagine it will ever happen, no matter what Justice Abadee says, but once journalists start spilling their guts life will be made even easier for the crooks, incompetent and stupid. And Lord knows the defamation laws are giving them an easy enough time as it is.