Paying sources for information has been a knotty ethical problem for years. But in the light of several recent court cases,shouldn’t the regulator speak?Lord Justice Leveson did not hear, or himself construct, or many criticisms of the worn editors’ code of practice embraced by the Press Complaints Commission. Nor can there be much complaint over finding it now – marginally updated – as a key text in Independent Press Standards Organisation affairs. Add warnings over reporting suicides,gender identity and over-excited headlines, and you’ve more or less got the meat of it.
But that means that one of the big issues of recent years goes unexamined. Patrolling from court to court and verdict to verdict, and it’s the problem of newspapers and their reporters paying sources for information. On the one hand,an absolute no-no (just see what American newspaper codes have to say); on the other hand, a practice that much of the British press appears to find in the public interest, and with juries benevolently agreeing when asked.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com