On the night of October 28, 2015, Pulitzer Prize winner, Carol Leonnig spoke to students and faculty at Penn State for the Foster-Foreman Conference. Leonnig works for the Washington Post and came out with a very powerful, controversial news story about a shooting at the White House and how the Secret Service tried covering it up.
Ethics is very important in any story a journalist writes, no matter how big or how small the story may be. But I thought to myself, how do ethics work when writing about one of the most public figures in the world, when they are also one of the most secretive figures as well. Now this is hard work.
With research, she discovered that this wasn’t the only incident. The ethical questions I thought of were: How do you tell the public about these secrets; do they need to know? And, can you trust the sources giving you this information? These go hand in hand because as a journalist, she needed to tell the public the truth from sources she could trust.
When dealing with the first ethical issue of public interest, she knew the public had the right to know even if it meant gathering information that was confidential and illegal to obtain.
When talking about political figures, Gene Forman explains, “Public performance on public officials. Although the officials may try to evade the media’s scrutiny, it is an axiom of our democracy that the people’s business should be conducted in public. Governments at all levels have enacted laws to enforce the concept- laws that require governing bodies to debate and vote in public. And counts to be open.” (Forman, 243).
With more research, she discovered that is was a man from Idaho who drove all the way to DC and shot at the White House several times in 2011. He shot at the exact place where Sasha Obama was with her grandmother. Leonnig came out with, “The night bullets hit the White House- and the secret service didn’t know.”
She also discovered that, ‘there have been worse things than this but they cover it up.” For example, how the “President was actually really unsafe.” She decided that it was her duty as a journalist to tell the public because they needed to know that the Secret Service wasn’t doing their job to their full abilities.
How did Leonnig tell her audience about the secret documents she obtained when they were probably given to her illegally? She knew this needed to be told, the public needed to know that if the most powerful man in the Unites States wasn’t being protected, were they?
She explained that all of her information came from “whistleblowers.” Leonnig had all of them handed to her by “whistleblowers”. She said it was “very shocking” because she actually never got them directly from the Secret Service.
The second ethical question was: Ethics in reporter-source relationship. Could Leonnig have some sort of relationship with the people who gave her this top-secret information to her to tell to the public? Since she wasn’t getting any direct information, only sources of people saying they knew, they had to trust her with their identity and she had to trust them as sources. Journalist have the moral duty not to exploit a vulnerable person for their own purposes and their audience depends on them to resist a crafty source who would deflect them from the pursuit of the truth. (Forman, 226).
During her interview she said, “when dealing with a top secret like this, and many other stories there are going to be people who want to tell the truth.” She kept notebooks of all the conversations she had with “whistleblowers.”
In the Journal of Business Ethics, by Peter B. Jebb he explains what a whistleblower is by saying, “Whistleblowing is characterized as a dissenting act of public accusation against an organization which necessitates being disloyal to that organization…These features result in a definition in which motive has no part, and which requires a free choice decision to make disclosure to an external party” (Jebb, 77).
There were sources that were brave because they had so much to lose but told her that the public needed to know the truth about the Secret Service and their wrong doings.
She said that, “Some of the people I met were not heroic but they still had information.” And they were willing to talk to her because by publishing this, the Secret Service would do better for the White House. Leonnig motioned sources knew that the only way this was going to be fixed was to talk to the media
Leonnig also said something I learned from. I always thought you must announce who the source was. But she said, “As long as you know them and a motive the information is important not them.”
One of the ways she got good information was by meeting face to face with these sources. That way there was no evidence they had ever talked on the phone or emailed. “I spend a lot of time meeting people in person and that’s not always so easy.”
I learned a lot from Carol Leonnig during her speech. Especially things I haven’t learned in the books. For example, how she doesn’t have to tell the audience who her sources are or how she got the information. As long as the story is factual, the rest doesn’t matter. I like how she said, “The most amazing feeling very ever is pulling that curtain and showing the public and then seeing the public use that to do something about it.” This issue is so important because this is the law; these people are the ones protecting our government, and the people who make the rules we as Americans have to follow in our everyday lives. If they aren’t doing a good job at protecting that and the President, then are we being protected even if we follow the law? Overall, I think she was a wonderful speaker and gave me a lot of knowledge about how to handle being a journalist when the job gets tough.
Peter B. Jebb: Jebb, B Peter. (1999). Journal of Business Ethics (Volume 21, Issue 1, pp 77-94).
Gene Forman: Foreman, G. (2015). The Ethical Journalist: Making Responsible Decisions In The Digital Age (Second ed., p. 5). N.p.: Wiley Blackwell.