And more...

I have been away for a while, but I need to post before the month is up. I've fogotten most of my stored-up criticism but there's always something fresh.

They just finished a report in which they concealed the identity of a teacher who had a concern of retribution, not for speaking out against an apparently stupid policy (but who knows, because we never get both sides), but because she admits violating the policy. This gets a black mark from me.

I think it would be ethical for the news to protect its source by concealing the fact that she did something for which she could legitimately be sanctioned, because revealing that fact would chill the willingness of sources to come forward. Sure. But after that, there were choices made that probably weren't right.

Maybe, if the source's confession of rule-breaking were not presented, she could have been shown and identified. We don't know if there was any reason to fear retribution for simply voicing disagreement with the policy. This is a public school system, and in principle, one is legall protected from retribution for speaking out in a private capacity on a matter of public policy. There was no hint in the broadcast that any reasonable apprehension derived from speaking out -- just from admitting insubordination in violating the rule.

In actual journalism, it's considered a good thing to reveal sources. Secret sources are not subject to public truth-testing and hence unreliable unless corroborated. It's always better to get a specific, identified source for a fact as opposed to keeping the evidence in your back pocket.

But I doubt this was much of a concern for Channel 4 News. My guess is that they chose to hide the identity of the source because it adds drama to conceal faces, distort voices, and pretend the source is like some kind of spy who risks grave peril for disclosing the dirty secret.

But here the dirty secret was the source's own wrongdoing. Regardles of whether the rule violated was justified, this same station that flaunted that wrongdoing, and its complicity in abetting it, has frequently in the past run special reports where it exposes individual wrongdoers. The distinction here appears to be the reporter didn't like the rule. The station made a value judgment that the rules they collaborate in enforcing are good rules, and this rule was a bad rule. They decide. They would not have to decide whether they liked the rule if their goal was simply to report the facts. The point of the story was not the violation of the rule, but the fact that the rule exists and is questionable. They could still point out that they'd received reports of the rule's violation, but to do so was less important than to be neutral.