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The relationship between journalists and their sources is at the very heart of reporting. As such, it’s always subject to controversy and ethical considerations. These questions aren’t new, but they are especially urgent now, considering the proliferation of misinformation and disinformation online, and the way that AI-generated content often separates information from its source.
Reporters have always argued about whether to use unnamed sources, the best way to protect our sources, and how transparent to be with our audiences about our sources’ identities. All of these questions become more complicated in the digital age, seldom more so than in the case of Reality Winner, the young government intelligence analyst who gave The Intercept a single classified document and, in turn, received a sixty-three-month prison sentence. The document concerned Russia’s campaign to sway the 2016 presidential election by hacking into voter registration databases in the United States; Winner thought this was something the public needed to know. She paid the price. She was indicted under the Espionage Act, pleaded guilty, and eventually was punished with the longest prison sentence ever given for leaking classified information to a media outlet: five years and three months.
“She was the first whistleblower of the Trump era, and she was easy to go after: a young nobody,” James Risen, the renowned investigative reporter, said in 2021. The organization he directs, the Press Freedom Defense Fund, which is part of The Intercept, footed the bill for Winner’s legal expenses. The Intercept’s handling of the document failed to protect her identity, and may have contributed to her fate.
Reality Winner is an extreme example of the dangers that sources sometimes face when they provide information to the press. Among the most notable examples in the past fifty or so years are Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning, all of whom leaked classified information that they felt the public should know about. But the methods have evolved.
Publishing the Pentagon Papers involved removing reams of papers from government offices and using a Xerox machine to make copies. These days, the ease of digitally transmitting huge caches of classified information—as Manning did—and the risk of leaving behind the whistleblowers’ own digital fingerprints have vastly changed the game.
Often, it’s the sources who are in the greatest danger. Snowden’s information helped the Washington Post and The Guardian win a joint Pulitzer Prize for revealing how the US government was spying on its own citizens. But Snowden, also charged under the Espionage Act, had to flee the United States to avoid an almost certain prison sentence; it’s doubtful that he’ll ever return. News organizations don’t generally consider this their problem.
Source-reporter relationships are seldom as high drama as those, but they remain fraught, especially when national security is involved. In this area of reporting, the use of anonymous sources is most justifiable, but even when withholding a source’s name from publication is necessary, the practice erodes public trust in the press. When news organizations, including the New York Times, relied too heavily on anonymous sources during the run-up to America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, the resulting stories misled the public about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction and helped pave the road to war. The Times later tightened its practices on the use of such sources.
“I do think one antidote to this is for journalists in their work to explain as much as possible how they work,” said John Daniszewski, the longtime standards editor at the AP. “Pull back the curtain a little bit about the source reported by this person here who talked to this many people, things like that.”
He continued: “Transparency, I think, increases trust. If you’re using anonymous sources, even if you can’t use their name, try to say as specifically as you can without disclosing their identity.”
Journalists have occasionally gone undercover to reveal information that would otherwise be impossible to obtain. Some of them are famous and admired. Going back more than a century, to the late 1800s, the intrepid Nellie Bly checked herself into an insane asylum under the name Nellie Brown and emerged with stories of beatings and neglect. In the 1970s, Chicago Sun-Times journalists opened and staffed a tavern to expose how corrupt government inspectors accepted bribes from small-business owners. The resulting report, revelatory as it was, was shunned by the Pulitzer Prize board because of concerns about the ethics of a story based on wholesale deception. “The board concluded that truth-telling enterprises should not engage in such tactics,” wrote Ben Bradlee at the time.
Not all misrepresentation rises to that level. In 2013, New York Times reporter Eric Lipton was working on an article about some former aides to Senator Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat, who became lobbyists. As he explored their new roles, he decided to attend a Capitol Hill social event where the former Baucus aides would be in attendance.
Here’s where the ethical dilemma arose: The meeting was not open to the press or the public, which Lipton knew. But he believed he had a reason to attend. “Politicians and lobbyists speak very differently in private settings than when they’re with reporters. It’s impossible to hear them speaking in an unvarnished way without going to these events,” he said in a Times public editor column. He didn’t lie about who he was, but he simply identified himself as Eric. After a while, asked for more detail, he gave his full name and his affiliation with the Times and was asked to leave, which he did. Later, a spokesman for Baucus complained to the Times. As the Times public editor at the time, Margaret concluded that it was far from a mortal sin, writing, “What Mr. Lipton did should not become an everyday practice. But…it’s not only pretty small stuff, but also reflects some journalistic initiative that serves Times readers well.”
Brooke Kroeger, a New York University journalism professor and author of Undercover Reporting: The Truth About Deception, told Margaret that one of the guiding principles of journalism is that it should not do “unintended harm to persons not in a position to defend themselves.” She argued that undercover and surreptitious reporting has produced some of the most impressive and important work in the history of journalism. Think of the Washington Post’s 2007 exposé of the practices at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. That coverage exposed the often deplorable quality of care for war veterans there. While never misrepresenting themselves, Post reporters did get a rare inside view by staying under the authorities’ radar as they visited families and patients. The investigation, undoubtedly important in itself, also brought about reform—and won a Pulitzer.
In more recent times, technological advancements have made it easier for both traditional journalists and advocacy journalists to blur or cross the line between ethical and unethical behavior.
In June 2024, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito met Lauren Windsor at a gala for the Supreme Court Historical Society. Posing as a pro-life conservative Catholic, Windsor secretly recorded Alito saying that he hoped we would “return our country to a place of godliness.” (The District of Columbia is a one-party-consent district, meaning there is no law against one person recording another without their knowledge.) She posted it to her own site and also provided it exclusively to Rolling Stone.
In the days after the release of Windsor’s tapes, dozens of news organizations covered both the content and the means by which it was obtained. She has been described as an advocacy journalist and a liberal activist. On her website, she lists her role as executive producer for Undercurrents, “a grassroots political web-show for investigative and field reporting” sponsored by a progressive nonprofit. Her position, a liminal place between traditional journalist and activist, and the ethics of her secretly recording a Supreme Court justice threatened to overtake her own story of Alito’s comments.
In a commentary piece for Poynter, Tom Jones asked Poynter Senior Vice President Kelly McBride, chair of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership, if it was ever kosher for journalists to misrepresent themselves to sources. “I would never say never, but I have yet, in twenty years of offering ethics advice, seen an instance that I would say it is justified,” McBride replied.
“Any other journalist would be fired for doing something like that,” she continued. “Like any ill-gotten piece of information, it puts us in a position as journalists where we have to be very transparent with the audience about what we know and what we don’t know.”
Perhaps no journalist knows that better than Robert Winnett. In June 2024, freshly installed Washington Post publisher and CEO William Lewis announced that Winnett, deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph and a fellow British journalist and former colleague, would take over as the Post’s top editor after the presidential election. Winnett was intended to succeed editor Sally Buzbee, who had reportedly clashed with Lewis over coverage of his alleged involvement in the News of the World phone-hacking scandal. While Lewis hadn’t been a part of the original slate of editors charged in the scandal, he was named in a later lawsuit filed by Britain’s Prince Harry, who claimed Lewis was part of a cadre of editors working feverishly behind the scenes to cover up the scandal.
An investigation by the New York Times after Winnett’s Post appointment alleged that Lewis had assigned, and Winnett had written, stories using illegally obtained materials. (Lewis denies the accusations.) A Post investigation into Winnett suggested he’d been involved in a scheme in 2010 to steal a copy of former British prime minister Tony Blair’s then-unreleased memoir. Less than a week after the story was published, it was announced that Winnett would be staying at the Telegraph after all.
“Truth is the rudder that steers ethical decisions in journalism,” McBride wrote in 2014, amid the Sony email-hacking scandal. “Is this information true? That’s the first, but not the only question journalists ask. Does it enhance our understanding of a situation? The obligation to seek the truth trumps, but does not excuse, other ethical transgressions.”
When information comes from a questionable source, the bar for newsworthiness—which should always be a high one—becomes even higher, and thoughtful decision-making even more necessary.
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