It started as an intriguing tip: Two years ago, a suburban cop was fired because he was stopping teenage boys, threatening to give them speeding tickets, and then letting them go in exchange for sex. But the police chief did not refer the case to the district attorney for possible charges, avoiding embarrassing publicity for the department. Now, two years later, and in the wake of other allegations about a troubled police department, our sources wanted us to know about this episode.

We located two of the victims, and they confirmed what had happened. One victim, now 24 years old, even agreed to talk about it on camera, without having his identity concealed. He described, in detail, the sexual contact in the officer’s apartment when he was 19 years old.

But a few days later, the young man called us back. He’d changed his mind. He did not want to be on TV.

Ethical decision #1: Should we air the interview? He did the interview voluntarily. We had it "in the can." He was not retracting his statement, simply asking that we not use his name or picture. We decided to use the interview, masking the man’s identity electronically. We did so because he was, essentially, a sexual assault victim, and we routinely withhold the names of such victims. Furthermore, it was his information that was important, not his identity.

Ethical decision #2 proved to be a lot more difficult. A week later, we tracked down the former officer, living in a small town 150 miles away. We surreptitiously took pictures of him working in his yard and then approached him for an interview.

When we told him why we were there, he immediately broke down. He asked to speak to me alone. He tearfully confessed to what he’d done, told me he’d tried to put that ugly period in his life behind him, and assured me he’d had no contact with teenagers since then. He said he’d been receiving counseling from a minister. And then he asked if we were going to put his story on TV.

When I told him why we were there, he said, and I’ll never forget his words: "Well, you’ve just made up my mind. I’m going to get my shotgun and go out into a farm field and kill myself. I hate myself for what I’ve done. My parents don’t know why I left town. And I can’t stand the thought of them finding out."

I spent the next hour trying to talk the man out of committing suicide. I told him he shouldn’t do anything foolish since there was a chance the story might not air, that nothing he’d done was worth dying for. I coaxed. I cajoled. I pleaded. It was, perhaps the most difficult hour of my life.

He finally assured me he wouldn’t do anything until he’d heard from me. We left and went straight to his church. We told his minister about the suicide threat. The minister agreed to visit the man immediately.

We drove back to the newsroom for discussions with news management and the station attorney. Legally, the story was clean. We had all the facts nailed down, including a confession.

Journalistically, we had a good story. But ethically, we had a problem. Could we tell this story, knowing it might cause a man to take his life?

We wrestled with other questions as well: Was it still a story, since the incidents had happened a few years ago? If so, what was the most important part of the story? And was this man still using his authority to take advantage of teenagers?

We came up with these answers:

Because the officer had resigned, he was no longer in a position to use his badge to take advantage of teenagers. He had assured me he was not involved in activities that put him in contact with young people. And we knew, if we did a story, the D.A. would investigate to find out if he was telling the truth and letting him know he was being watched.

We decided it was still a story. But we believed an equally important part of the story was the fact that the police chief had allowed the officer to resign, without referring the case to the D.A.

Yet, we did not want to do a story, that might result in a man’s suicide.

We decided to air the story, withholding the former officer’s identity. We electronically altered our videotape of the man working in his yard so he could not be recognized. We notified him in advance, through his minister. In our story, we told the viewers about the sexual incidents. And we explained how the police chief had handled the case.

The D.A. immediately launched an investigation. Months later, after interviewing everyone involved, the D.A. decided he was not going to prosecute the former officer, so long as he had no further contact with teenagers. The D.A. criticized the police chief for the way he had handled the case. But the D.A. ruled the chief had not acted criminally.

The police chief, declaring himself cleared of criminal wrongdoing and citing his age, 55, immediately resigned.

The former officer did not kill himself.

We believe we handled this case responsibly. But there is a larger issue: Can the threat of suicide be enough to kill a story? If so, some important stories probably would go unreported. Each case, we decided, must be based on its own set of facts.

For further analysis of this issue, see "How to handle suicide threats".

I started dialing, but stopped. Wait a minute, I thought. That new prefix is nowhere near Paterson. I called information and found out it was in Toms River, at least an hour away.

By law, all department heads and most other employees, had to live within city limits. My "friend" Fred could be immediately fired.

Here was the number three official in the city administration flouting the residency laws. The residency requirement had been a topic of hot debate in City Hall because a deputy fire chief was claiming he was being blackballed from the department’s top job because of his outside-the-city address. Mayor Frank Graves had said publicly that he believed in the residency statute above almost anything else for determining who could work what jobs for the city.

There was also the competition factor to consider. I worked for the North Jersey Herald & News and would do almost anything to beat my rival, the much bigger Record in Hackensack.

To be honest, I would not hesitate reporting on almost any other official. But Fred was more than just a source, he was just about the only person inside the Graves cabinet that I could trust to tell the truth. Any time I doubted the administration’s calculations on the budget, I called Fred who would set me straight. Fred had also steered me to some major front-page stories. As a source, he was invaluable.

I did nothing that night. I did not even mention it to my editors because they would have wanted me to run with it right away. I knew holding the story could affect my credibility as a reporter. After all, I was cutting someone a break just because he had helped me.

But it takes time to develop a source like this, especially in a tight-lipped and well-controlled administration like the one in Paterson. After beating your head against stone walls all day, it was nice to find an open door. I liked Fred. At least this one night, I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt.

The next day, I confronted Fred. He told me he lived in Toms River because it had a fine special education program and he had a son with a learning disability. Fred did not try to sway me from writing any story.

Whatever Fred’s reason, he was still breaking the law. I had heard that other members of the Graves cabinet were not living in the city, but here I had proof.

I weighed the facts. On one side, I had a story and a good one. A high-ranking city official, responsible for helping set tax rates, did not live in the city, contrary to the law. On the face of it, it was my job as a reporter to tell that story.

But on the other side, Fred was a good source with whom I had developed a relationship over a year’s time. Not only did he make my job easier, he gave me some of the best stories I had written while covering the city. If anyone argued that I had a personal stake involved, I could just point out the warts within the government that Fred had helped me expose.

In the end, that was the final argument that tipped the scale toward not writing the story. I honestly felt that my readers would be best served by having Fred in his job.

The story may have remained buried, except for Andy Torricicollo, a city resident who made it his business to find and right all wrongs in the Paterson government. Andy also had no reservations about calling city employees at home. One night he tried Fred’s number. He heard the same recording. He learned where Fred lived.

Andy approached me before the next council meeting, about a week later. "Do you know where Fred lives?" he asked me. I played dumb and he told me. Then he told me he was going to bring this before the council. "It isn’t fair that we have to live in the city and face the problems and the taxes and someone like him who controls our money, should live somewhere else," he said.

I told Andy it would be a mistake to tell the council about Fred. I explained to him that Fred helped the residents more by telling the truth about some of the problems in the city than by living in the city.

But Andy told the council during the public session. The next day, The Record made it the lead of the story. I buried it in my story, leading with the possible axing of some of the city’s social programs, which I considered to be more important.

One of my editors said I should have lead with Fred’s residency. "This is a good story, why wasn’t it higher?"

"The social programs affect more people," I said. I only received a shake of the head. "Why didn’t you know about this sooner?" I didn’t answer.

Fred lost his job and took a better-paying one with the State Department of Community Affairs.

The new city finance director was a good friend of the mayor. She pleasantly referred almost all questions to him.

Today, the relationship between the press and the politicians is less relaxed and more adversarial. And I’m kind of sorry about that.

I’ve always been comfortable around politicians. They’re a pretty outgoing breed. And they’re obviously interested in the things that shape our lives and our institutions or they wouldn’t be in politics.

Most of them, I’m convinced, are not really much different from the rest of us, reporters included. So why does the new generation of journalists treat them with such disdain? Why the detachment to the point of indifference? Why the preoccupation with questioning motives and searching for minor misdeeds?

Perhaps it’s the legacy of Watergate. Perhaps the air has been poisoned forever. I hope not.

When I first began covering politics and government at the state level, most reporters at the capitol lived just like the lawmakers in a hotel, out of a suitcase. We spent our evenings drinking with politicians, sometimes dining with them, maybe even engaging in a friendly game of cards. But mostly just talking or arguing issues, politics or strategy, and building mutual contacts and trust.

Most of the Statehouse press corps in those days were lifers. They had stayed around long enough to build the expertise that permits a reporter to go below the surface and to offer readers not just what occurs, but why and how.

You really don’t see as much of that anymore. The guys in the Statehouse pressroom tend these days to stick around for a few years and then move on to Washington or into better-paying positions, including governmental public relations.

I think that this constant shuffling of folks into and out of the Statehouse pressrooms is unfortunate. It can result in a lack of perspective and it makes it easier for the governmental flacks and campaign spin doctors to orchestrate what the public gets in the way of political news and analysis.

But I guess it’s the detachment that bothers me the most. Journalists who spend a career covering government have a very special body of knowledge and experience — and ought to use it for the benefit of the community.

I’d like to think that readers are our constituents just as they are the constituents of the lawmakers. It’s a shame to divorce ourselves so totally from the proceedings of government that we waste that unique body of knowledge and experience we’ve acquired. An old hand in the Statehouse pressroom shouldn’t have to apologize for occasionally dipping his oar into the legislative process.

I recall talking a few years ago with the chairman of the Peoria County Board who was complaining about the time and expense to the county caused by a state law requirement that any local liquor license suspension be subject to an appeal to the state and a second hearing.

He felt it wasn’t fair that county prosecutors had to make their case at the local level and expose all their evidence and testimony and then go through a second hearing at the state level where the defense had an opportunity to reshape its case or present new testimony.

I agreed. When I returned to the Statehouse, I asked a friendly legislator who had a bill pending on a separate provision of the Liquor Code to amend the measure to take care of this inequity.

That’s the kind of "legislating" a newsman can do without jeopardizing reputation or integrity.

Another time, I worked with legislators to steer to passage a bill calling for a multi-million dollar bond issue for construction of civic centers downstate — smaller versions of the massive convention center the state had built for Chicago.

Tourism is as important to Peoria, Rockford or Springfield as it is to Chicago and I’m proud to have played a role in getting the civic centers.

I also don’t think it’s improper to suggest to a legislator that a bill doesn’t really do what it purports to do. These are busy people and they often rely on staff to prepare the measures they introduce.

Some years ago, a state lawmaker introduced a bill he said would provide a state subsidy for mass transit districts throughout the state. But because of a drafting error, the bill would have provided funds only for the transit systems in Chicago and in his own area near St. Louis.

I pointed out to him the error in the drafting and suggested that failure to correct it might cause him some political embarrassment in those communities slighted — and likely some votes, too. When the bill became law later that year, it was fair to every segment of the state.

Can a reporter get too close to sources or people he covers? Sure. That’s always a danger. But it has been my experience that a guy you’ve shared a drink or swapped a story with can take a hit when he’s got it coming just as long as the critical story deals with fact.

The new breed of journalists may be squeaky clean, but I think they shortchange their readers and themselves if they treat the folks they cover with detachment that borders on disdain and also fail to use their special knowledge and experience to its best advantage.

You are given the number of a telephone in the locked ward of the mental hospital where the suspect is being kept until doctors form an opinion of his competency to stand trial.

Do you call the suspect? Do you report what he says?

A reporter for The State, Columbia, S.C., did telephone that suspect and The State did publish some of his comments.

The suspect, James Wilson, a 19-year-old high school dropout, has pleaded guilty but mentally ill and has been sentenced to death in South Carolina’s electric chair for those shootings on September 26, 1988.

With a number provided by Wilson’s grandmother – who said he was lucid – and at her suggestion, the reporter had two conversations with Wilson.

The result was a page 1 story headlined "Shootings ‘like a dream’ ."

In that story, Wilson admitted to the shootings and said he felt "real bad about what happened." He also talked about a People magazine article on shootings at an elementary school in Winnetka, IL, and a book about Wayne Gacy’s killings, which he had just read.

Wilson had torn the article from People and "I read it every day. I had it for a few months," he said, adding that he could understand that killer. "I think I may have copied her in a way."

He talked, too, about his childhood – how he had felt neglected, how he had been abused and ridiculed by schoolmates and his father. He said he had thought a lot before taking his grandfather’s pistol, buying cartridges and driving to the school.

The State published those comments, but not without forethought and caution.

Before telephoning Wilson, the reporter and an editor discussed the lack of taping equipment and of how they would verify the identity of who was reached on the telephone.

A man answered the telephone and summoned Wilson by hollering his name. A youth with strong country drawl came to the phone. The reporter identified himself and Wilson responded "Yes, sir," when asked if he would like to talk about the shootings.

Wilson’s identity was verified by answers to several questions, including his birth date, and the location of a particular magazine in his home.

Questions were asked to determine his mental state and ability to understand that the newspaper was seeking his opinions for publication. He was asked about his surroundings and how he felt he was being treated. Questions were repeated two or three times to compare answers.

In a second interview, Wilson was asked to clarify ambiguous or incomplete answers. Wilson said he was on no medication at the hospital other than a pill to help him sleep at night. The interviews occurred between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m.

Three or four of us read the transcriptions of the telephone conversations with Wilson, and our lawyer was involved in our deliberations. My greatest concern was whether Wilson was lucid, that whatever he had to say was newsworthy.

After that call, I was convinced that Wilson knew exactly what he was doing. Our primary concern was getting the information. In deciding whether to publish, I was compelled by some of the things Wilson had said, where he basically said why he had gone on that rampage.

The State published Wilson’s comments the next day. Advocacy groups and lawyers accused the newspaper of being sensationalistic, taking advantage of a mentally ill person and denying the suspect benefit of counsel.

The shootings were a sensational event. But the fact that we could offer the reader some insight into the thinking of someone who would commit such a crime was compelling reason to publish.

The criticism that Wilson was mentally ill and we were taking advantage of him is off base. He was extremely lucid and artful and cagey during the interviews with us.

There is no question that "Jamie" Wilson is crazy in the conversational sense. Before the shootings, he had a long history of psychiatric treatment in a variety of mental health facilities but had always been released. His family had tried to have him judged mentally ill, but he had been judged sane repeatedly.

The criticism that as a newspaper we have a responsibility to aid a defendant in getting a fair trial is preposterous. A complex system of courts protects and defends suspects and the public. Our role is to provide information that the public can use in the evolution of public policy, which includes operation of the courts.

We published "Jamie" Wilson’s story because it allowed the public to hear the suspect talk about his state of mind. The story satisfied the question of why, which is seldom answered in cases like this.

Would we handle the Wilson story in the same way, given a second chance? Yes.

Would we call another suspect at a state mental hospital? Maybe, depending on circumstances. In the Wilson story, we helped the public better understand a tragedy and the weaknesses in a mental health system. We would need equally compelling reasons to publish any information gained by another call to a state hospital.

A star athlete in college and an honors graduate, he had just been named "Teacher of the Year" at Rock Hill High School. A year earlier he had been chosen "Beginning Teacher of the Year" for the entire district. He was an assistant baseball coach about to move into the top job. He was handsome, affable and popular.

In an interview for The Charlotte Observer about his team, he told me he had roomed with George Brett during a brief stint in the majors, studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and published a book about John Kennedy’s assassination.

His story was too good to pass up. In the end, the story would cost Chip Smith a career. We had to decide whether it might also cost him his life.

Before a second interview with Smith, I made routine background checks. Kansas City had no record of his playing in the Royals’ system. McGraw Hill, his reputed publisher, had not heard of him.

I did not tell Smith of those calls, and in the second interview he repeated his claims and even elaborated on some.

Further reporting demolished other claims. Although nominated for a Rhodes Scholarship, he never became a finalist as he claimed on his resume, let alone the scholar he bragged about being. He had not played varsity basketball in college, although he had added that to his impressive athletic record.

Confronted, a shaken Smith acknowledged the embellishments and said he didn’t know how the stories had started; but they had snowballed. Please, he pleaded, don’t write an article exposing the lies.

The decision to write wasn’t a foregone conclusion. Discussions raised these questions, among others: Did the story reach the news threshold, or was it a private matter? What had Smith done? He was not a public official, he had not robbed a bank, and he hadn’t really hurt anyone.

Moreover, he didn’t live in Charlotte, but in a smaller city nearby. Wouldn’t people there consider the exposure an invasion of privacy, a personal embarrassment the paper could have avoided?

On the other hand, his tales about the Kennedy book and the Rhodes Scholarship had become public when his hometown paper ran an admiring interview. Students and teachers had heard Smith brag about being an All- American basketball star and a major league baseball player. While teachers privately questioned his accomplishments, students marveled.

By augmenting his stature, his deceits cemented his status as a role model.

Smith had a position of public trust; "Teacher of the Year" accolades further set him apart as a model. At least part of his public image was based on misrepresentations.

We thought it was important for the community, and particularly the students, to know that.

"Publication in The Observer of the facts clearly would make his life more complicated," Editor Rich Oppel recalls, "but the story was coming out one way or the other."

We decided to publish, and told Smith.

Then his mother came to talk to Oppel, an acquaintance. Why write the story? she asked. What’s the point, or the news? Had he hurt anyone? If we published the story, she said, Chip Smith would commit suicide.

Now, news judgment became moral judgment.

Oppel questioned Smith’s mother closely, asking why she feared for his life. It was simply a mother’s concern, he decided. "I am pretty sure that I would not have agreed not to publish because of a death threat," Oppel says. "If you do that, doesn’t a death threat become the way to keep a story out of the paper?

"But I probably would have taken the time to consult with the story subject’s physician or clergyman, or perhaps even talked to police."

After the story ran, community sentiment was uniformly sympathetic to Smith and negative to the newspaper. He lost his job at Rock Hill High School and went to work for his mother’s catering business in Charlotte.

Did we make the right decisions?

On news judgment, yes. On the question of moral judgment, I don’t know.

Smith didn’t commit suicide; others have. As a reporter, I don’t feel qualified to decide whether a person will do what those close to him fear he may. Editor Oppel, who had talked to Smith’s mother, obviously had a different opinion, and, as he said, Smith, "like the rest of us, is responsible for his own actions."

Journalists know they’d best avoid actual romantic involvement with their sources — and that the other extreme, naked skepticism, is unlikely to encourage sources to spill their guts.

But what about romancing a story? Are you honor bound to tell an interviewee the truth about the focus of your story? Or is it OK to let sources hang themselves without having a clue where you’re heading?

One silver lining in the cloud of recent Supreme Court decisions is that journalists are taking a new and careful look at reporter-source relationships (see also "Thou shalt not break thy promise" regarding Cohen V. Cowles as well as "The great quote question" and "Thou shalt not concoct thy quote" regarding Masson v. New Yorker). Before, it was easy to be cavalier with sources, if one were so inclined, because the relationship apparently had no legal standing.

It’s different now. Reporters need to consider their promises very carefully since they’re no longer free to decide when it’s alright to break them. And what counts as accurate representation of a source’s words has been dissected as never before.

Yet other subtle ethical quandaries still strew the path between what reporters promise and what newsrooms print or broadcast. Attention now to the subtleties of how reporters ought to treat sources may forestall courts from providing further dictates of how they must.

For example, reporters don’t want to tip their hands, but sources feel burned if they don’t know from the start what the reporters have in mind. What do reporters owe their sources? In this case, other professions can’t provide much guidance. Reporters don’t owe sources the kinds of things doctors owe patients or lawyers owe clients. There, the professional is obliged to act in the best interest of the lay person involved. Reporters who did the same would commit the egregious professional sin of acting as PR agents.

There is something about the reporter-source relationship that looks a little like what happens between a judge and a defendant at a juryless trial. Like the judge, the reporter makes decisions that have enormous impact on the source’s life. Certainly the source, like the defendant, is trying to cut the best deal possible. But no matter how manipulative or malevolent a source may be, the reporter literally has the last word.

Even this analogy breaks down. Sources aren’t always bad guys; a story isn’t a prison sentence. And the source, unlike the defendant, is free to walk away despite the reporter’s threats or enticements.

But good reporters treat their sources with respect. Olive Talley, reporter for The Dallas Morning News, tells sources what she knows prior to publication, but not necessarily early in an investigation. "Your opinion is not fully formed early on. You might not have all the facts," Talley says. And the interview itself might answer some suspicions.

But before the story hits the streets, sources should have the opportunity to comment. "It’s only fair," she adds. "I believe that we have a great responsibility to inform our sources, but timing is critical. It’s not, ‘Do we?’ but ‘When do we?’" Talley views her practice as pragmatic as well as ethical. "I operate on a level of honesty because I think that people respond better to it."

Even with the increasing amount of time reporters spend prying information from computers today, real live sources are still necessary to get the job done.

And people don’t like to be fooled. They especially don’t like it when reporters pretend to admire them while preparing to nail them to the wall. They don’t like it when the context of quotes changes between interview and publication.

Sources who’ve been deceived avoid talking to reporters, as do their friends. Or if they talk at all, they do so in such a careful and limited way that reporters wind up with little real information.

The need for reporters to be honest, straightforward and clear extends even to the sleaziest of sources. What if it were known that reporters would deceive only the bad guys? If reporters always seem friendly, still sources would never know if the reporter was being honest with them.

A story that’s won through seduction is sorcery, not sourcing. No professionals (except magicians) can last long if trickery becomes known as the usual method of operation.

If Janet Malcolm had let Jeffrey Masson read her profile of him for The New Yorker ahead of publication, a law suit recently sustained by the U.S. Supreme Court probably never would have progressed to its current dangerous stage.

Most journalists oppose pre-publication review (PPR, for short) on ethical and legal grounds. They won’t show an entire story or even part of it to a source in manuscript form. They won’t participate in telephone readbacks. They won’t check direct quotations for accuracy and context.

But that journalistic taboo is misguided. I have practiced PPR as a newspaper staff writer, a magazine freelancer and a book author. Never have I regretted my practice. What I do regret is failing to do it during the first decade of my career because of mindless adherence to tradition.

I started using PPR occasionally while working as a project reporter on the Des Moines Register in the mid-70s. It was the first time I had the luxury of writing non-deadline stories and therefore the opportunity to check for accuracy. Many sources had feared talking to me, knowing when I called, it usually meant they’d be part of an investigative piece. But promising them the chance to check my manuscript gave them the self-assurance to talk after all.

It was nearly ten years ago that I started making PPR my normal practice. The story that played a major role in my decision was the same one that led me to forever abandon relying on anonymous sources. Ironically, it was not an investigative piece but a fairly light feature for a leading journalism magazine.

The topic: computer-assisted reporting, something very new in 1982. My peg was a Washington correspondent for a major metropolitan daily who’d devised marvelous techniques for building computer databases that yielded interesting pieces. Some of the reporter’s colleagues, however, disliked this newfangled journalism. I quoted one of the detractors, anonymously. My point: to show that anybody considering such a high-tech method might run into newsroom doubters.

That anonymous quote started a witch hunt within the newsroom to identify my source. The Washington bureau chief begged me, then angrily ordered me, to reveal the name to him. I refused. The anonymous source was upset, too, because of the witch hunt and because he/she felt I’d failed to use strong enough criticism.

During the midst of this brouhaha, I attended my first journalism ethics conference and realized the stupidity of anonymous sourcing and of risking inaccuracy unnecessarily.

Journalists have lots of ethical obligations; at or near the top of the list is accuracy. And accuracy encompasses a great deal, including getting facts straight, quotations verbatim, paraphrases in proper form when eschewing exact quotes, and providing context. PPR allows reporters and editors to accomplish those goals without surrendering control over the ultimate story.

Maybe Janet Malcolm will become a convert. Her main outlet has always been The New Yorker, which was previously renowned for its fact-checking. But her profile of psychoanalyst Masson was checked only part way. If he’d been permitted to review his quotes, he and Malcolm might have worked out their differences. Instead, they’re enmeshed in a multi-million dollar, multi-year, unnecessary libel action that could seriously erode journalists’ First Amendment protections.

By now, numerous journalists reading this are likely apoplectic. I’ve raised this topic in enough newsrooms while conducting investigative reporting workshops to know I’ll get hate letters and enraged phone calls. But the prospect of the Malcolm-Masson dispute going to trial is reason enough to subject myself to the ire once more. And every time I raise the subject, I hear from journalists who practice PPR but fear coming out of the closet.

PPR has many benefits. First, it often gets me access to sources otherwise reluctant to talk because they’ve been misquoted or because they have a vested interest in keeping quiet, or both. My written promise of pre-publication review puts some of their fears at rest. Of course, I spell out that the review is for purposes of accuracy only and that I retain total control over whether to make alterations.

Second, PPR has occasionally caught errors of fact or interpretation, which is the point.

Third, PPR has jogged the memory of sources, who often offer me even better quotes, even more compelling evidence, than during the original interview.

The objections I hear from journalists fall into four broad categories:

• Sources might deny direct quotes or other information, thus censoring the story before it appears. My reply: If the denials ring true, it’s time to reevaluate the evidence. If, on the other hand, my shorthand notes, tape recording and/or documents confirm my version, I change nothing.
• Sources might place pressure on higher-ups in the news organization to kill the story before publication. This is a melodramatic objection that almost never happens and has certainly never happened to me. If it did, I’d present my evidence to my editor or whomever and if he or she failed to back me, I’d never work for them again. I’d also make sure my colleagues knew of their cowardice.
• Sources might threaten to sue upon reading the manuscript. So what, I reply. Courts almost always reject pre-publication censorship. Besides, if a source is angry enough to make that threat, the same source who hasn’t seen the article beforehand might sue after publication. Should that occur, many judges and juries would be impressed that the reporter offered an opportunity to check accuracy.
• Pre-publication review is unprofessional. Reply: No matter how much we like to think journalists get stories correct, this is wishful thinking. Every journalist I know who’s been quoted but not afforded PPR has later complained about being misquoted or taken out of context.

Using PPR might spare media the necessity of running corrections and clarifications almost daily. It is shocking that some magazines, The New Yorker included, some newspapers and perhaps the majority of broadcast stations afford no opportunities for setting the record straight, short of litigation.

Any journalist condemning pre-publication review reflexively — because "it just isn’t done" — ought to try it at least once. In the unlikely event it backfires, then there is cause for debate.

When the Supreme Court ruled in June that journalists’ promises to sources can be legally binding, Al Larkin felt compelled to act.

As managing editor for administration at The Boston Globe, Larkin posted a memo restating the paper’s policy of protecting the identity of confidential sources. He then cautioned reporters that "this decision applies to almost any agreement reached with a source, not just an agreement not to reveal their identity. It is not a good idea to make promises to sources."

Of course that’s true, but it’s sad that it had to be written in this context and that what should have been a call for higher professional and ethical standards became a warning about legal repercussions.

But that’s just one of the unhappy legacies of Cohen v. Cowles, a case that’s bad news for journalists — and not only because it was arguably the worst example for such a test.

The case was spawned by the decision of two Minnesota newspapers to identify a source who’d been promised anonymity. The justification by the St. Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch and Minneapolis Star Tribune: that the campaign smears dished out by political consultant Dan Cohen were less newsworthy than the fact that he was the source of the dirt.

What the Minnesota editors ignored was that most journalists have been willing to serve time and pay fines rather than reveal the identity of a source promised confidentiality. It’s one of the few subjects on which virtually all journalists agree, and it’s been that way from the beginning of modern journalism.

Courts have recognized journalists’ belief that reporter-source agreements are inviolable since as far back as 1878, when a reporter sued a competing paper for libel for printing an unfounded story that he’d broken a promise of confidentiality. The Michigan Supreme Court backed his claim that, just as calling a woman a harlot is libel unless it’s true, it is inherently defamatory to say a reporter reveals sources.

In the relatively rare cases when a source is burned, the rule is that heavy counterweights are necessary to justify it. A survey I conducted while Cohen was pending showed that journalists usually reveal sources only as a last resort, and only when faced with an ethically significant conflict (such as to save a life or prevent a serious crime) — not for what might be called the Minnesota standard: because the source’s identity is newsworthy.

The rejection of that justification was shown by the number of media organizations that declined to join the friend-of-the-court brief filed in Cohen. While some heavy hitters did show up, notably The New York Times, the lack of unanimity on what was supposed to be an important First Amendment test revealed the feeling that the case had a noxious odor.

But now that it’s over, journalists have to live with the fallout from the Supreme Court’s decision.

The ruling likely will prompt more and different kinds of suits by aggrieved sources. Some, like Cohen, will file breach-of-promise suits for being identified. But others will see it as an opportunity to sue reporters for all sorts of other reasons.

Since all promises are covered, sources might claim reporters who’d promised to show them in a particular light failed to do so. That was the basis for an Idaho suit by a woman who said a reporter falsely promised to present her favorably in a story about the homeless. That suit was dismissed, but more are sure to follow. And since deals with sources are almost always verbal, juries might be torn over whom to believe, the journalist or the source.

Other suits are likely to result from the court’s rejection of the newspapers’ key argument, that the First Amendment gives the press a near-absolute right to publish truthful information about newsworthy events. Cohen was a public figure and the source of the information, just as the papers said, but that wasn’t enough to prevent this further erosion of press freedoms.

In addition, the case may weaken campaigns for stronger shield laws. Some journalists interpreted the Cohen ruling as tantamount to a national shield law because, they reasoned, by rejecting the Minnesota papers’ actions, the court was in effect blessing the sanctity of reporter-source agreements. But the door doesn’t swing both ways. The court simply repeated its longstanding position that the First Amendment doesn’t make reporters immune from generally applicable state laws, such as those requiring people to keep their promises. The justices offered no new legal protections for reporters from threats or sanctions by judges.

Some journalists are concerned that Cohen might be a double bind: If they refuse to reveal a source, they may face sanctions from a judge; but if they do divulge it, they may face a law suit. Not to worry. If reporters refuse court orders, they face the standard punishment; if they comply, they’re protected because the breach was caused by a judge’s order.

That leaves only situations where journalists decide on their own to burn sources. If there’s a valid reason, an ethical journalist’s conscience should be clear. And if a source does sue, even an anti-media jury could see the wisdom of revealing a source if, say, a life was at stake. Journalists who choose to betray sources for lousy reasons, though, might join the Minnesota papers in the "got what they deserved" category.

There are two ways to look at Cohen’s likely effect on people who truly need a cloak of confidentiality. On one hand, they might be afraid they’ll become the next Dan Cohen, and even a successful civil suit isn’t worth the pain of public exposure. But other sources might be emboldened now that reporters can say: "I know you’re worried, but the Supreme Court says I have to keep my promise."

The simplest way of minimizing the problems Cohen may provoke: Reporters must take meticulous care every time they make promises to sources. And they must be ready to keep those promises in all but the most compelling circumstances. If Cohen accomplishes that, the dark cloud will have a silver lining.

In October 1988, Smith called the newsroom at The Times in Shreveport, LA. I took the call and didn’t quite know what to make of it. You’ve had a sex change operation and you want to talk about it? Why?

Smith, whose first name was now Christina, said she wanted to help others who felt like she once did. "They don’t have to go around and be miserable. There is hope," she told me.

But was that reason for me to write a story? I wasn’t sure. Yet what a rare interview this would be for our readers. Smith was a graduate of a local high school and was now living in Southern California. I asked her to let me call her back.

Features editor Martha Fitzgerald and I only had to talk for a few minutes before deciding to at least go ahead with an interview. After that we could decide. We informed editor Frank Sutherland what I was doing.

I arranged a meeting and interviewed the 23-year-old Smith. We also got photos. Smith told me that after graduating from high school, she moved to Texas and then to San Diego. She dressed as a woman and basically lived as one for two years before having the $5000 operation at the Hospital Clinica Quintana.

"I wanted it for my Christmas present. I saved up for it and worked hard," she said. "I have everything a woman could want." And she wasn’t at all afraid to tell me about it.

"Why would I keep it a secret? I don’t mind if people here find out because I don’t live here." But she was afraid to let me call San Diego, where she said she was six months away from completing a licensed practical nursing program. She refused to give the names of anyone there.

Her parents still lived in Shreveport, but Smith said they accepted her and still loved her. She knew they would gain in understanding in time. "They said I look nice," she said.

After the interview, I stopped by her high school alma mater and picked up a copy of her senior class yearbook. There she was: Christopher Smith Jr. The resemblance was undeniable.

Back in the newsroom, I reported in with Fitzgerald. She thought if we could verify what Smith had said about the operation, we had a story Times readers would be interested in because this was once a Shreveport resident. We would run it, but not sensationalize it.

I contacted Dr. John Ronald Brown in San Ysidro, California, and he said that he had performed the operation on Smith. "These people are females," he told me. "It is a driving force within them."

At this point, we had the interview, before-and-after photos and medical confirmation. All we were really lacking were comments from the parents.

After phoning several times and getting no answer, I drove to their house. No one was home, but across the street I found Smith’s cousin. Smith had come to see her a few days earlier.

"I can’t believe it, but it is true. I saw it with my own eyes," she said. She knew Smith had always wanted to be a woman, but she couldn’t get used to the new name: "He’ll always be Junior to me."

Fitzgerald told me to try again for the parents. I initially disagreed because the facts had been confirmed, a relative had given us some great quotes and Smith was not a minor. She argued that the parents would be affected more than anyone by this story and even if they refused to be quoted, we should let them know we were doing the story and triplecheck our facts.

I went back to their house and ended up leaving a note in the door, telling them about the story and asking them to call me. Smith’s mother finally phoned me at 10:30 PM and she was furious, saying they would be devastated if the story ran. They would not answer any questions for it. She told me flat out that we simply could not print the story on her son.

I told his mother what Smith had said about their reaction to the operation and she countered by saying they refused to see him. He was no longer welcome at their house. It was always "he." This was still their son.

It became clear we had a new problem: Smith had lied. His parents were showing no acceptance and even less understanding. I told Fitzgerald about the phone call and then repeated the essence of the conversation to Sutherland. We all wondered anew about Smith’s motive for calling us.

This person had volunteered to go on the record with a story few people would dare discuss publicly. So that others wouldn’t have to go around and be miserable? Sutherland didn’t buy it. His feeling was that Smith was trying to use our newspaper to get back at her parents for things we didn’t know about. The story would be her revenge.

Motive, though, was not the critical factor for Sutherland.

"If she lied to us about the parents’ reaction, what does that do to her credibility? We can’t trust her," he said.

For him, the lie we had caught Smith in immediately cast a shadow on everything else she had told us. And parts of her story, particularly concerning her life in California, she refused to let us verify.

And that was that. The story died in a lie. My impulse reaction was to disagree: her credibility was really not an issue because we had confirmed the operation through other sources. But when I thought about that mother’s voice — the pain, the embarrassment — I was just as glad the story never made it into print.

 

^[1] Since The (Shreveport) Times never published the story, the name of the subject has been changed.

Suddenly, my editors and I had big questions:

Did we have the right to print sensitive and potentially embarrassing information about an adoptive mother from rural Maine against her will? Did she have the right to stop the story after she had knowingly consented to the interview?

Deb Pelletier had been remarkably candid when I had met her more than two weeks earlier. She told how she and her carpenter-husband had paid an out-of-state baby broker thousands of dollars to find them a white infant to adopt.

Before the interview began, Deb asked me if her name would be printed. I explained that the Portland newspapers have a strict policy about using only named sources. I advised her that to avoid misunderstandings she should not tell me anything she did not want in the paper.

I was quite clear on that point because several months earlier a source had given me personal information off the record and my editors insisted that it be printed. As a result of the disagreement, the whole story was spiked.

Deb showed that she understood the ground rules by declining to reveal exactly how much money she and her husband spent on the adoption or to identify the baby broker.

She did not know that the person who arranged my interview with her had told me the broker’s name, Richard Gitelman.

I spent the two weeks after my interview with Deb completing research and writing the adoption articles. When I phoned her to check some facts, Deb provided the information without voicing any concern about the story. But she declined to have a family photograph taken.

Eighteen days after the interview, Deb phoned with her startling news: She had been uncomfortable about the story and had finally decided that only her one-year-old daughter had the right to make public the circumstances of the adoption.

The next day, Deb repeated her concerns to the project editor, Tom Ferriter. She enlisted the help of a local lawyer in her effort to stop the story.

The newspaper’s attorneys reviewed case law in the area and concluded that the Pelletiers did not have grounds for claiming invasion of privacy.

But the ethical issues could not be so easily dismissed.

I had sympathy for Deb. It did seem unfair that we could print such private information about her family without their consent.

But I was convinced that I had thoroughly explained our policy and that she knew, or should have known, what she was agreeing to.

Ordinarily, this article would have been written and printed shortly after the interview. It was only because this project took several weeks that Deb had so much time to reconsider. I knew other sources featured in the adoption project also were having second thoughts. If we allowed the Pelletiers to pullout, would we have to do the same for anyone else who asked?

John Murphy, executive editor of the Portland newspapers, made the decision to print the Pelletiers’ story. He said he did so because Deb had agreed to the interview "with her eyes wide open," and because he thought the story would educate and inform the public.

Deb was allowed to read the story before publication, an unusual but not unprecedented practice at the Portland newspapers.

At her request, the editors agreed to omit the fact that the Pelletiers had arranged the adoption through Gitelman.

Fenriter said Deb apparently believed that she had an understanding with me that the broker’s name would not be printed, and he wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt because she was inexperienced in dealing with reporters.

Deb and her lawyer threatened legal action up until the day before the story was published. They have not contacted the paper since.

I was glad to see the story in print, but I was keenly aware that Deb probably felt taken advantage of by the newspaper. The experience reinforced for me how careful reporters must be when interviewing people not normally in the news.