Case Study: Overruling a Reporter’s Promise
Six days before the Minnesota gubernatorial election in 1982, Dan Cohen, an employee of an advertising agency working for the Republican candidate, Wheelock Whitney, approached reporters from four news organizations and offered to provide documents relating to an opposing candidate for lieutenant governor.
Cohen had been encouraged by a group of Republican supporters to release a file on Marlene Johnson, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor candidate for lieutenant governor. In exchange for a promise that he would not be identified as the source of the documents, Cohen gave them to the reporters. The documents showed that Johnson had been convicted of shoplifting 12 years earlier, a conviction that was later vacated. (Johnson contended that she was distraught over the death of her father at the time she was arrested for walking out of a store with $6 worth of sewing material she had not paid for.)
Two of the reporters who took the documents and assured Cohen of anonymity were staff members of competing dailies – the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
After debate in their respective newsrooms, the editors of the two papers independently decided to publish Cohen’s name as part of their stories concerning Johnson.
The editors justified their decision to overrule their reporters’ promise of confidentiality to Cohen on these grounds:
· Cohen’s actions amounted to nothing more than a political dirty trick; thus his motives were suspect.
· The editors judged that reporting the dirty trick was more important than merely reporting Johnson’s obscure court record, and Cohen’s name was essential to the credibility of the dirty-trick story.
· The reporters should not make promises of confidentiality without authorization from their superiors. (Such a policy had not been promulgated at either paper, and the two reporters had thought they had discretion to grant confidentiality.)
The day that the stories were published, Cohen was fired by his employer. Johnson won the election.
Cohen sued the newspapers for breach of contract. In 1991, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Cohen v. Cowles Media Company that such promises of confidentiality are legally enforceable under state law.
Despite the court decision, an ethical question remains: When, if ever, can a news organization justify disclosing a source’s name? Legal jeopardy should be taken into consideration in making a decision on this question.
In analyzing this case study, consider the two editors to be the moral agents. They are the ones who decided to break the promise of confidentiality.
Questions for Class Discussion
· Is it reasonable for Cohen to assume that the reporters were authorized to make a promise to him on behalf of their news organizations?
· Is it reasonable for a reporter to be able to assure a source of confidentiality and expect the news organization to support the promise?
· Should a reporter be required to consult with editors before offering source confidentiality?
· How important should a story be to warrant discrediting the reporter and damaging the newspaper’s credibility?
· What kind of discussion should take place in the newsroom before a reporter’s promise is violated? What weight should the reporter’s input have in the discussion?
· Would other stakeholders, particularly the news audiences and the sources, feel the breaking of a promise was justifiable? Should the newspapers disclose to their readers that they are breaking a promise to Cohen?
· The ethical conflict in this case is between (1) the right of the source to expect a promise to be kept and (2) the feeling of the editors that the audience needs the information about the source. To justify breaking the promise, the audience’s need for that information must be extremely high. Does this situation meet that standard?
Sources
Jay Black, Bob Steele and Ralph Barney, Doing Ethics in Journalism: A Handbook With Case Studies, 3rd Ed. (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1999), 281-2.
Louis A. Day, Ethics in Media Communications: Cases and Controversies, 5th Ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Thomson Wadsworth, 2006), 69-73.
Dan Cohen, Anonymous Source: At War Against the Media, a True Story (Minneapolis: Oliver Press, 2005), 36-55.
U.S. Supreme Court, Cohn v. Cowles Media Company, 501 U.S. 663 (1991). http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=501&invol=663