Romenesko

Miami Herald
Edward Wasserman says the dilemma is created when a journalist receives information of clear public importance, which is given to advance a private stratagem that's both morally questionable and known to the reporter. "The question is whether the journalist's professional obligation to report that information entitles him to ignore that unsavory private agenda," he writes in a column about the San Francisco Chronicle's BALCO reporting. "The short answer, I believe, is that it doesn't. Journalists aren't free to act as if that private agenda doesn't exist. They may well do the story anyway. But I think they must accept that they'll be complicit in that private stratagem, and must conclude that the wrongness of that complicity is redeemed by the wider public benefit of the secrets it unlocks."