Privacy & The Journalist

From Privacy Times, December 22, 1999

This Is Not News: Privacy & The Journalist

EDITOR'S NOTE: My 11-year-old son, along with one of his key teammates, has great taste in books. One favorite, More Adventures of The Great Brain, by John D. Fitzgerald, tells the story of a small-town boy, Tom, who could create and/or solve any problem using his great brain. Tom's father was editor of the town's newspaper. But when the father wouldn't let him work for the newspaper, Tom decided to start his own, deploying his little brother and friends as reporters. In the first issue, Tom broke the biggest story of the year: exposing who had carried out the town's only bank robbery, and causing their arrest. But the edition's other column reported on the personal lives of town members, including a wife who nagged so much she drove her husband to drink, and how a widow who spent more money on herself trying to get a new husband than she spent on her kids. While the town was pleased to see the bank robbers caught, several individual were quite unhappy to see details of their personal problems in print.

In lecturing his son, the father set forth some timeless standards for all journalists. He said Tom's local column "was a type of journalism that feeds on scandal, that hurts people and is in very bad taste."

"A good journalist doesn't deliberately hurt people just to sell newspapers. It is true a good newspaperman seeks to expose evil when that evil is a threat to the community. If a public official is corrupt, it is the duty of a newspaper editor to expose that official as being corrupt, because a newspaper is thereby performing a good service for the community. But when you print that Mrs. Haggerty's nagging drives her husband to drink, and all the other scandal in your local news column, that is an invasion of their privacy and subject to libel laws. Moreover, it performs no useful service for the community. Your mother and I do quarrel on occasions as you are well aware. It is part of married life. But how would you like it if somebody printed in a newspaper that your mother and I were fighting like cats and dogs all the time?"