|
Journalists live or die by their credibility with their sources. If you undermine the trust a source places in you, then you are ruined as far as getting information out of them goes.
However, there's another issue here, that of contempt. Should they have aired the tape? It's hard for me to say on the basis of what's here, but if there was serious risk of prejudicing the investigation, then I would say they are in contempt, and might be doing more harm than good by breaking the story.
And to the person who said the news corps should be regulated to remove 'spin' from their reports, do you not see how dangerous that is? Spin and bias are an accepted part of news journalism. Everyone is biased, about everything. It's human nature. Maybe when our news is disseminated to us by our robot overlords, it will be totally objective, but Governments closing down newspapers because of their 'spin'... That's banana republic territory.
The BBC model is a good one. It receives its funding through a licence fee, paid by every British owner of a TV set. It gets a charter from the Government, setting out its aims and objectives, generally related to 'public service' broadcasting. In this way, it is beholden to nobody. It has no shareholders, no advertisers, and no vested interests. It's interesting to see it go up against the Government, as it did over the Dr David Kelly affair.
|