PressEthic

In San Francisco, reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wade are facing jail time for refusing to name the confidential source who leaked grand jury testimony in the BALCO steroid abuse investigation. Despite this, last Thursday a Florida-based reporter for the Leesburg Daily Commercial, Marilyn Aciego, made a bold offer on Nancy Grace's CNN show:

"...if somebody does have Trenton, if they're scared to go to the police, if they're scared to go to anybody else, if somebody out there does have Trenton and they want to be protected, they're scared to come forward, call me, I will protect them. I have journalistic integrity. I protect my sources. We want this little boy home."

Ms. Aciego was referring to two-year-old Trenton Duckett, who was allegedly abducted from his mother's Leesburg apartment on 27 August 2006. Florida authorities have mounted an intense (and well-publicized) search for the young boy, in the hope that he may still be alive.

In promising confidentiality to anyone who may be holding young Trenton, Ms. Aciego is bravely innovating on the hallowed journalistic concept of confidentiality -- a legal protection that made Woodward and Bernstein's legendary Watergate investigative reporting possible. But in offering confidentiality to a person who could potentially be involved in a criminal act (kidnapping a small child!), is Ms. Aciego violating the spirit of legal protections that were intended to protect aggressive, investigative journalistic endeavors?

Fellow CNN guest Det. Lt. Steve Rogers (of the Nutley, New Jersey Police Department), offered immediate support for Ms. Aciego's on-air offer, which would essentially grant legal immunity in exchange for the child's safe return:

"I think that reporter hit the nail on the head, and I'm glad she said this. If there's someone watching your show tonight who has that baby, bring that baby to the reporter. I know reporters will protect you. It's so important that, if a person has that child, they know that they’re not going to be prosecuted. So just return that child if you have that child."

And perhaps Det. Lt. Rogers is correct -- in a life and death situation, should we stop to split legal hairs and debate what course of action best upholds the spirit and theoretical integrity of a law? I'm sure any parent hoping to recover a lost child would agree that that response seems cold and needlessly cerebral.

Still, I'll admit that I was taken aback when I read the report of Ms. Aciego's statement. Who can say what prompted her abrupt, on-air offer -- perhaps it made for a dramatic TV moment, or maybe she was moved by a sympathetic desire to help reunite a worried father with his child.

But all good-intentioned motives aside, offering journalistic confidentiality to an unknown person who is potentially a criminal seems problematic (to say the least!). Aren't journalists supposed to proceed cautiously, in order to make an informed and considered decision to grant a source confidentiality?

After all, as Duke Law Professor Erwin Chemerinsky points out in a recent Orlando Sentinel story, more reporters are spending time in jail in order to protect confidential sources because federal prosecutors are increasingly seeking jail time for those who choose to maintain sources' confidentiality.

Under any circumstances, jail time is a potentially high price to pay in order to uphold one's journalistic integrity. But this seems especially true if one's professional integrity was recklessly bartered in a CNN "TV moment" for -- the benefit of a potential felon.