By Chuck Lindell
Austin American-Statesman (Austin, Texas)
Published: 10/09/05
Excerpt:
While the journalism world is in agreement about the value of confidential sources, not everybody agrees on the remedy.
“In order to grant such a shield, you have to determine who is a
journalist, and there is no satisfactory answer to that question,” said
Al Tompkins with the Poynter Institute, a journalism resource center.Are bloggers journalists? Are opinion columnists? Or writers who don’t get paid for their work?
“It’s never been an easy answer. And it now seems like the answer is changing more rapidly,” Tompkins said.
To define journalists, Poynter uses two primary tests:
- Do you seek the truth and tell it as fully as possible?
- Do you act independently of your own bias, self-interest, profitability and other outside pressures?
“If there’s any question if it’s a ‘journalist,’ my default is to say
yes, because the cost of overregulating is way too high,” Tompkins said.
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