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Source HygieneIf reporters practiced better "source hygiene," maybe they'd face fewer subpoenas.

By Jack Shafer
Posted Thursday, April 17, 2008, at 7:00 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

Confidentiality should generally be doled out sparingly, he writes, "reserved for sources who are providing information that is important and in the public interest, and who, by doing so, are risking their lives, jobs, or reputations" and should not be granted without pre-publication approval of the editor-in-chief. Pearlstine's guidelines continue:

Reporters and editors should understand that they have no legal or moral right to promise confidentiality to a source beyond what is recognized in the law. … If a journalist expressly promises more than the law allows, the promise is legally ineffective, like any other promise that is contrary to public policy. A journalist who knowingly deceives a source by promising more than the law authorizes should be subject to professional discipline and civil liability to the source.

Had former USA Today reporter Toni Locy practiced better source hygiene, would she be in the fix she is today? Locy faces contempt charges for refusing to surrender to a federal court confidential sources who spoke to her about the 2001 anthrax attacks and Steven J. Hatfill. Hatfill is suing the government under the Privacy Act, saying that the anonymous FBI and Department of Justice sources damaged him with hundreds of leaks to the press and that his only path to justice is access to Locy's sources.

I don't want to be Locy's jailer, but the press owes Hatfill and its readers explanations for its coverage in the anthrax stories. Pearlstine's rule that confidentiality should generally be granted to sources who provide important information at some personal risk wasn't followed. Locy and other reporters published anonymous government leaks that have damaged the life of a seemingly innocent man. Hatfill's lawyers insist—with some justification—that in the Hatfill case confidentiality arrangements have helped to hide government wrongdoing, not expose it. (A similar observation can be made of press conduct in the Wen Ho Lee case.)

Editorials about Locy's legal dilemma tend to follow the absolutist view about confidential sources. For example, the March 24 Washington Post editorializes, "Reporters rely on regular confidential sources to burrow into their beats; if they can be arbitrarily required to identify all their sources, it's likely they won't have any." The editorial makes no mention of how the press allowed itself to be used.

Confidentiality isn't so sacred to the press that leading news organizations and reporters won't jettison those revered sources when it suits them. Press scholar Stephen Bates writes (PDF) that after Oliver North blamed others for his own leak in 1987, Newsweek identified him as the source. After a source on a Russian money-laundering story misled the New York Times in 2000, the paper dropped a dime on him. The Boston Globe put off-the-record comments made by President Jimmy Carter on the record after he covered some of the topics in his memoir. And after William Casey died, Bob Woodward outed him as a source. More recently, Woodward exposed Mark Felt as Deep Throat after Vanity Fair got the story through Felt's family.

Both the Post editorial and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press conclude that the fix for the Locy mess is the pending federal shield law. No doubt if a storm of asteroids was falling toward Earth, the Post and the RCFP would use the occasion to call for passage of a shield law. Self-scrutiny has never been the press corps' leading virtue, and its ability to imagine itself the victim is nonpareil.

******

Maybe they should let Bruce Willis rewrite the shield law. Send suggestions to . (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum, in a future article, or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)

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