Lyle, I’ve been trying to sort out the threads of our recent discussion, and I’d now like to look at some of the issues you mentioned and along the way, clarify a few points of mine which might have been less than clear.
The issue I initially raised related to Jenkins’ comments about David Miranda’s detention at Heathrow, which he described as “the sort of treatment western politicians love to deplore in Putin’s Russia or Ahmadinejad's Iran.”
The thrust of his article was that even though
Greenwald is not known to have commited any offence in reporting Snowden’s NSA material for The Guardian,
Miranda’s offence, under the UK 2000 Terrorism Act, was that he was Greenwald’s partner and so Jenkins asked whether journalism was now to be seen “as a terrorist occupation.”
We moved from this to the issue of “newsworthiness” and I’d like to now revisit some of your posts and make some further comments.
Journalism cannot be a buzzword to do anything one wants.
If Person A steals something and Person B receives the stolen item.
Person B cannot go about claiming that he has a right to sell it because he's a journalist.
If Snowden stole KFC's secret recipe of 11 herbs and spices and gave it to
Greenwald, does Greenwald have a right to publish it?
If I wanted to know the exact vote totals for the year BBM was up for Best Picture
and I somehow had access to that information, even though I signed agreements
not to disclose the information, but I did to a journalist, I would not expect to be
without consequences even though there are many people who'd like to know that
information.
I think there are some issues here which I could have addressed before I responded to your points about KFC’s culinary recipes and AMPAS votes.
• First, the idea that being a journalist entitles someone to “do anything they want” surely depends upon whether or not what they did conformed to what’s described as “news” otherwise, I feel, there’d be little point in being a journalist.
In the 1960s the Norwegian media researchers Johan Galtung and Mari Ruge analysed international news stories to find out what factors they had in common, and what factors placed them at the top of the news agenda worldwide.
They came up with a seminal list of twelve criteria or factors which defined “newsworthiness,” all of which had to be present to “heighten the probability that a given event would become news.
Three of these were the criteria of “Threshhold” (which an event had to reach before it became news), “Intensity/Absolute Intensity” (e.g. the more violent the murder, the bigger the headlines) and “Uniqueness” (e.g. any story which covers a unique or unusual event).
More recent scholarship (McGregor, J.,
Restating News Values, UNZ, 2002) suggests that three new criteria be incorporated:
- Visualness (e.g. A bias towards a good picture on TV as opposed to a worthy story, the hypothesis being that an earthquake killing 1000 people in remote Siberia will be not covered as well as an earthquake killing ten people in London, unless by some chance the Siberian disaster was captured in film or a survivor had access to a television studio);
- Emotion (e.g. Some forms of news, particularly television magazine news, have mutated into a passing parade of “tear jerker” stories that are variations on the theme of grief); and,
- Conflict, for without a conflict format the event cannot be news (e.g. Political and controversial events are driven by a conflict format in which there is little ambiguity in the opposing positions being represented; if ambiguity arises the otherwise potential story will become too complex to be news).
• Next, you said that “Person B cannot go about claiming that he has a right to sell [stolen information] because he's a journalist.Well, I disagree with you there, Lyle. It’s precisely because Person B
is a journalist that he can publicise that information—if it satisfies the definition of “news.”
(Although I admit I’m a little confused by your reference to Person B “selling” the information; is that what you think Glenn Greenwald did?)
• I’d now like to take a fresh look at your two scenarios.
The first one is unusual because although it supposes a situation in which someone stole something and then gave it to someone else to publish, the two people you named
not only exist but actually did these things in real life (except that the information involved wasn't that of your scenario), so the question’s answer is obvious:
“Yes, as a journalist he (Greenwald) did have the right to publish it (but only if he thought it was newsworthy, which he did).”
The second one, though, is more effective because it involves (presumably) an actual hypothetical situation, one in which the consequences of certain actions for the persons involved (the breaking of a confidentiality agreement, the theft of AMPAS voting secrets and the publication of those secrets) are to be considered. The answer in this case would also be “Yes, they could expect consequences.”
All of that said, I’m unsure how your points related to the treatment David Miranda received because he was Glenn Greenwald’s partner.
Sorry, mate.
