Informed public Better protected against threats

People’s right to know and be informed helps in protecting them against threats

One year ago, the Court of Appeal for Ontario deftly summarized an error committed by both those who oppose and support the protection of journalists’ sources.

It summarized the error by making it.

“A free and vigorous press is essential to the proper functioning of a democracy,” it said. True enough.

“The protection of society from serious criminal activity is equally important to the maintenance of a functioning democracy,” it said. Right again.

But then this: “Those fundamental societal concerns can come into conflict.”

So it said in its decision to side with a safe public over an informed public by pretending they were in conflict rather than being one and the same, as they almost always are.

The Supreme Court may say the same of the same case, in which Vice Media continues to challenge the RCMP’s attempt to take reporter Ben Makuch’s communications with a selfdescribed Canadian ISIL terrorist without the journalist’s consent.

Whatever the Supreme Court says here, it is almost always incorrect to say that the protection of free expression is at odds with the protection of public safety. This does not prevent nearly everyone on nearly every side of nearly every such case from making the error.

On security matters, it is often assumed that we can either protect the public’s right to know or we can protect its right to live.

Would it not be more accurate to say that the public’s right to know is usually one of its strongest protections against threats to public safety? If the public does not have enough information about crime, violence and terrorism, it cannot make informed decisions about the policies and politicians that are supposed to protect peoples’ lives.

One can almost forgive the stay-dumb-or-stay-safe fallacy more easily when it derives from cynical self-interest rather than ineptitude. It can at least serve law enforcement’s interests, though usually not the public’s. It is less clear why journalists and their defenders don’t point out the obvious link between physical safety and information more clearly in cases such as this.

While my colleagues and I rarely tire of calling ourselves the guardians of democracy, we’re less confident in making a narrower argument that is no more inspired but no less true for being uninspiring: If the press is more free, the public is better armed against terrorists and violent criminals.

Of course, there may be rare exceptions to the standard positive relationship between a free media and a safe public. But the fact that anyone could consider the Vice case to be one such exception confirms that we don’t generally recognize the positive relationship between knowledge and safety at all.

The Vice reporter was communicating in 2015 with a source believed to have travelled to Iraq or Syria to fight with ISIL. There is little chance of protecting the public from the source, as the source is reportedly dead. If the source isn’t dead, there is little chance of prosecuting him, as the source certainly isn’t in Canada.

And whether he is dead or outside the country, there is an even slimmer chance that the reporter’s materials, three years old, can foil a terror plot.

And so, some press freedom advocates argue that journalists’ privacy should be protected. Correct.

They argue that journalists shouldn’t be used as an arm of law enforcement. Also correct.

But as long as we emphasize freedom of expression over enforcement of the law, or enforcement of the law over freedom of expression, we perpetuate the charade that more information doesn’t keep people more safe.