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Friday, September 26, 2003
Seares: Not naming – and refusing to name – news sources
By Pachico A. Seares
The view from here
Just a month ago, I asked a UP Cebu journalism class to find out what newspaper practices readers find distasteful or offensive.
The class did a phone survey and went out to the field for random polling, and returned with a long list of media sins, from negativism and sensationalism to sloppy reporting and editing of news stories.
Curiously, not one complaint against not naming sources, which is a big thing in a number of surveys abroad, including the poll conducted recently by the American Society of Newspaper Editors (Asne) on credibility of newspapers. That Asne study showed public disapproval of anonymous sources.
They don’t care?
While the UP class study was limited and inconclusive, still it indicated audience mood, especially that it focused on frequent newspaper readers.
Don’t Cebu readers care about reading or listening to news stories in which the source is not named and serious “facts” are disclosed by “reliable sources” or someone “who requested anonymity”?
Local readers must find it bothersome, though probably not annoying enough to write letters to the editor or gripe in some survey.
What’s wrong with not naming sources? The reader doesn’t know who disclosed the “fact,” so he won’t know if it’s true. The source hides, or is hidden, and nobody can be confronted about the truth or falsity of what he says. No one accountable here. To many readers, it is like being made to trust someone they don’t know or see. The feeling can be one of helplessness.
Refuge of anonymity
The journalist and his paper or broadcast station, of course, can be made to answer for the published material, especially if the unsourced story turns out to be untrue.
Yet, how often do we see them seek refuge under the same cloak of anonymity, saying they cannot break the condition imposed by the source?
There’s the larger harm inflicted by unnamed sources: Faceless people can lie in the news stories, thus confusing data fed to the public. And the perpetrators get away with it.
True, the journalist and the news outlet pay in eroded credibility but that takes time. Meanwhile, the public debate, muddled by unnamed sources, suffers.
How about Sotto Law?
While non-disclosure is disliked by the public, yet there is the Sotto Law that says journalists cannot be compelled to reveal their sources, except when “national security” demands it.
Doesn’t the law encourage the hiding of sources when public interest demands that they be exposed to support the information they publish? Is the Sotto Law not thwarting, in a way, that public interest?
The inconsistency is, as lawyers put it, more apparent than real.
The Sotto Law helps the whistleblower, especially the poor and the weak who can’t fight off the affluent and the mighty who are hurt by the exposure of wrongdoing. The law protects the informant even more than the journalist pressured to reveal his source.
That is to encourage the continued flow of information. Without the assurance from the Sotto law, the tap will shut off.
Story still solid
While that law protects the tipster, it doesn’t provide license for the journalist to write the story without naming reliable sources, be they people or documents.
The story, leaked by a whistleblower, still has to rest on rigorous data gathering and specific attribution.
The Sotto Law spares the journalist from revealing the tipster, not from producing a solid story.
Stiff, yet reasonable
The local audience may not too keen about showing its distaste for unnamed sources. Yet, we know the public mood, so why risk further loss of credibility?
Exceptions to non-disclosure are clear enough:
The unsourced item must be material information (not opinion or speculation), essential to the story, information not available elsewhere except from the unnamed source, and the unnamed source must be credible and reputable. Plus this: Does the story have to be told?
Stiff conditions, to be sure, before journalists can hang a story on a faceless source. Yet the conditions are reasonable.
Alive and well, but...
As to the Sotto Law, it’s there, alive and well. But let everyone concerned about press freedom know that there are legislators lurking and waiting for a chance to dilute the law by changing the condition of disclosure, from “national security” to “national interest.” The bastards.
(September 26, 2003 issue)
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