Paying for truth?

I wish to respond to John Mclellan’s Comment piece “How paying for information can land journalists in hot water” (28 November). The Chartered Institute of Journalists voted to add the Code of Conduct clause: “Journalists should be able to compensate sources of any kind in proportion to the public interest value of their information and the risks they are undertaking” in order to state the law as it is.

That is why 32 journalists were cleared in prosecutions for paying public official sources. That is why the Court of Appeal quashed two convictions when judges failed to direct juries that only damaging the public interest by paying for the information would, in law, be an offence.

The phrase “should be able to” means individual journalists have the right to exercise individual conscience in terms of their moral position. The clause is about protecting sources who are whistleblowing, usually about lifethreatening situations. All journalists and their publishers should be able to compensate and support such people and that could include providing safe accommodation, private security protection, covering travel expenses and offering some compensation for the risks such sources face if their courageous truth telling is publicly exposed.

That’s what protecting journalistic sources means in practice; not just maintaining their confidentiality. I covered every day of the Clive Ponting trial at the Old Bailey in 1985. He was a public conscience-motivated MOD official who believed telling the truth about the sinking of an Argentine battleship during the Falklands War overrode the then 1911 Official Secrets Act (OSA) that give him no public interest defence. The jury found him not guilty.

Parliament reformed the OSA in 1989 and although not providing an explicit public interest defence, created a pragmatic one by requiring the prosecution to prove that journalists receiving unauthorised information have to know that it was damaging.

The Human Rights Act 1998 has super-charged the democratic necessity for protecting’ sources under Article 10, which protects freedom of expression.

Terrorism legislation that the Met Police thought entitled them to seize source information has been declared incompatible with the Human Rights Act. The same will happen to the Bribery Act 2010 and Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2016.

The CIOJ are backing former prison officer Robert Norman’s appeal to Europe because his whistle-blowing was about saving lives, his arrest, prosecution and jailing were disproportionate, and our democracy depends on journalists being able to report truth to power from protected sources.

(PROF) TIM CROOK Chair of Professional Practices

Board Chartered Institute of Journalists

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