What Do Journalists Owe Their Sources?

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We all know about General Stanley McChrystal, the now-former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, who lost his job earlier this summer over quotes by his aides in a Rolling Stone article. But does anyone recall the name of the reporter who did him in? And did Michael Hastings, who wrote the exposé on McChrystal’s inner circle, lose any sleep over a story he almost certainly knew would get people fired? I suspect not. He appears to be like most journalists, shrugging off the sizeable collateral damage resulting from their stories. But what happens when you are the collateral?

On June 1, three weeks before General McChrystal was forced to resign, I had just started my day as the religion editor of the Washington Times, my employer of more than fourteen years, when Sam Dealey, the new executive editor, summoned me into his office. He said that he was doing away with my beat and laying me off. “This is payback,” I told him. I was referring to the snake.

Several weeks before, in late April, staffers who had gathered at the morning news meeting in the first-floor conference room thought it was a man’s belt curled up behind the door. Then they realized it was a three-foot-long black reptile that must have crawled in through a vent. With a debt of some $6 million, the newspaper was apparently no longer paying for an exterminator to keep out the creepy crawlies from the next-door National Arboretum. Word around the newsroom was that three snakes had been spotted. One editor joked that the newsroom was now officially a hostile working environment.

All of this was of immense interest to the Washington Post reporter chronicling the paper’s slow demise. There was plenty for Ian Shapira, a ten-year veteran at the Post, to write about. The Times had just dumped its publisher, Jonathan Slevin, who then fired off a lengthy and acrimonious letter to the staff that landed on the Internet in nanoseconds. The missive accused Dealey of bad behavior and leaking information to the press. When he contacted me, Shapira assured me that Sam Dealey “wouldn’t mind” if I went on the record to talk about staff reaction to Slevin’s leaving.

I paused. Hadn’t I spent my career sweet-talking all manner of religious officials into letting me use their names? Aren’t people more believable when they put their names on what they say? Doesn’t going on the record have more integrity than going the route of the camouflaged sniper? I gave Shapira what I thought was a vague, general quote that cited no names. Here’s how it appeared in his Post article:

“The feeling everyone feels is that it's a totally rudderless ship,” said Julia Duin, the paper's longtime religion reporter. “Nobody knows who's running it. Is it the board of directors? We don't know. There was a three-foot-long black snake in the main conference room the other day. We have snakes in the newsroom — the real live variety, at least. One of the security people gallantly removed it.”

I also gave him the names of several other reporters to call, with the understanding that he would quote them as well. I assured him I had nothing to fear by going on the record. When star reporter Jack Kelley was implicated in 2004 for lying in his USA Today dispatches, a few USA Today employees went on the record to criticize how editors had overlooked Kelley’s fabrications for years. That same year, Oregonian columnist Steve Duin  (my brother) criticized his employer in the pages of the American Journalism Review for mishandling a sex scandal involving former Oregon Governor Neil Goldschmidt. None of these people lost their jobs, possibly because their employers — which, like all news organizations, often depend for content on people willing to criticize the institutions they work for — understand that if you are going to dish it out, you should be willing to take it.

When I saw Shapira’s piece the morning of May 1, my blood ran cold. Shapira had not used the other reporters’ names. Only mine. And, thanks to the snake quote, the article went viral over the Internet. Shapira had been trying to get a big story on the Washington Times for months, and I had handed it to him.

The timing could not have been worse. The White House correspondents dinner, a spiffy affair at the Washington Hilton to which media organizations invite celebrity guests, was set for that night. Top officials at the Times, which put out big money to host several tables, suddenly had to deal with an embarrassing quote from one of their senior reporters in the A section of their chief competitor. The next day, I got a phone call. A friend said the big topic of discussion among the Times top brass attending the event was: Should they get rid of Julia Duin now or wait a few weeks? They waited exactly one month.

To be fair, Shapira did call me to confirm my quote before the article ran. And I had agreed to go on the record. But given the catastrophic professional fallout for me, I am left wondering if the Post reporter had a larger obligation to create more of a shield for the one source willing to speak to him on the record. Had Shapira gotten three people on the record instead of just one, would I still be employed? On May 6, he posted a comment on a Washington Post blog insisting that he takes good care of his sources. But he had not protected me when I went out on a limb to help him nail down a good story that needed telling.

I asked Robert Steele, director of the Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University and a professor of journalism ethics, what he thought a reporter’s obligations were in a situation like this. He said that a lot depends on how high up the source is. “Someone who is less powerful by virtue of rank and role is more vulnerable to repercussions based on reporting,” he said. Protecting a source is not a reporter’s primary obligation; printing the truth is, he added. But a source’s vulnerability “is a number in the equation, and the reporter should recognize that.”

In talking over these issues with Kevin R. Kemper, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Arizona, he remarked that if the source is willing to go on the record, the source has to take the consequences. Still, he said, “reporters who themselves become sources tend to rethink how they do journalism.”

Over the past several weeks, I have done plenty of rethinking about how I approach my vocation. Journalists have no idea what it is like to be left to pick up the pieces of your life while the reporter who shattered it, however inadvertently, has blithely moved on. Most writers – and I have been one of them – do not have the guts to do a post-mortem investigation to find out what went right and wrong with our articles. Once we have what we want, we cut and run, leaving our sources to deal with the consequences, which could be severe.

Most journalists are much more adept at protecting themselves from a lawsuit than at helping people who go to some risk to talk to us because they want the truth to be revealed. In the future, I will certainly try not to abandon such people. And if a source challenges me with the possibility that she could lose her job if caught talking with me, I will assure her that I understand all too well.

Julia Duin has covered religion for five newspapers, including the Houston Chronicle and the Washington Times. Her most recent book is Days of Fire and Glory: The Rise and Fall of a Charismatic Community. She lives in Maryland and can be reached through Facebook or her blog at www.juliaduin.com.