Journalism Revisited, Crowd-Source to Pay A Story
JS: Journalism ethics come into debate whether it's OK or not a journalist paying sources. How if the information being gathered is more precious for public interest? Should we do on this matter and how we deal with the distorted information? The nowdays trend of crowd sources initiative is likely accepted.
When It’s O.K. to Pay for a Story
By KELLY MCBRIDEJUNE 9, 2015
St. Petersburg, Fla. — JOURNALISTS frown on paying sources. This decades-old principle stems from the belief that the tawdry practice corrupts the authenticity of information: If I pay you to tell me your story, you may distort its details to up the value.
So last week, WikiLeaks disturbed many journalists with an initiative to crowd-source a $100,000 “bounty” on the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. The website, which made headlines in 2010 when it published large caches of leaked documents from the United States military in Afghanistan and Iraq, has been pressing hard for sources to steal the trade documents; it has already published three leaked chapters (a reported 26 remain secret).
Setting a bounty on the treaty text turns journalistic mores on their head. In traditional newsrooms, the idea of offering a cash incentive for the leaking of confidential documents is anathema. But WikiLeaks, like other media disrupters, leaves us no choice but to reconsider this prohibition. If journalism organizations refuse to do so, they relegate themselves either to secondhand reporting on documents obtained by those outside journalism or to being left behind.
It’s true that trade deals, which are usually about tariffs and the price of goods, are traditionally negotiated in secret. But the TPP exceeds agreements like Nafta in scope and scale and involves far-reaching foreign policy decisions.
Its measures will touch the lives of every citizen in the 12 countries expected to sign the pact. Chapters already leaked suggest that the deal restricts fair use of copyrighted material, expands medical patents and weakens public policies that govern net neutrality.
Members of Congress can read the text in a secure room but cannot discuss its contents publicly. Representatives from about 600 private corporations are said to have access to the document via a secure portal. Yet the public is excluded.
The job of journalism in a democracy is to exercise scrutiny to hold power accountable. Given the TPP’s secrecy, WikiLeaks’ crowd-sourced leak-funding campaign, which has raised about $56,000 to date, can be seen as a logical response to a process designed to thwart public debate, an investment in democracy even.
In practice, there has long been a gray zone in the media industry. British tabloid newspapers have a long history of “checkbook journalism,” while some American TV news shows have often paid large sums for certain material, as when ABC News gave Casey Anthony $200,000 for photos of her then-missing daughter.
The entertainment news site TMZ generates stories with global appeal by paying for tips and photos, like the harrowing 2011 images of the brutalized face of the pop singer Rihanna. In 2013, Gawker used crowdsourcing to raise money for a video of Toronto’s mayor, Rob Ford, smoking crack. (Crowdfunding for leaks may mitigate a traditional objection to paying sources by introducing transparency into dealings that are usually opaque.)
New sites like these are often more concerned with sensationalism than the noble ideals of the Fourth Estate. But in the TPP case, WikiLeaks’ bounty would give millions of citizens in signatory countries the ability to debate a major piece of public policy. And without this information, how are they to guide their elected representatives who will ultimately enact or reject the policy?
Kelly McBride, a media ethicist and a vice president at the Poynter Institute, is a co-editor of “The New Ethics of Journalism: Principles for the 21st Century.”
