Secrets. Secret settlements. Secret documents. Secret sources. When someone who is privy to the secrets decides to break the circle and confidential records end up in the newspaper, is it legal? Is it ethical? Is it moral?
Those were some of the questions posed to The Courant last Monday, the day after the newspaper first offered a glimpse at court documents and testimony from civil suits against six priests in the Bridgeport diocese accused of sexual abuse. The suits resulted in the diocese, under the leadership of then-Bishop Edward Egan, paying millions in settlements last year. But the details of the suits were kept secret until last week.
Evidently, a few readers thought they should’ve remained that way.
“As far as pedophiles are concerned, they should spend their life in prison,” said Kathy McMahon of Durham. “But my question is how does The Hartford Courant get secret court documents? Did they steal them from someplace or do they have someone else who steals them?”
“Confidentiality is supposed to be honored,” said another reader, who did not leave her name. “You are undermining the judicial system better than any other organization I can think of. … I find the entire article was strictly meant to destroy Cardinal Egan just as The Boston Globe is doing to Cardinal [Bernard] Law. … All intended to undermine the Catholic Church.”
You can be sure The Courant did not steal the confidential documents. That’s illegal. And The Courant’s editors would not sanction illegal activity.
And although the documents aren’t the Pentagon Papers, as another reader pointed out, that’s where the precedent lies. In 1971, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. government could not stop The New York Times and The Washington Post from printing articles based on “top secret” government documents relating to the Vietnam War, it reinforced the First Amendment, giving the press the freedom to “publish news, whatever the source, without censorship, injunctions or prior restraint.” And, like it or not, that’s core to journalism; a responsible press is supposed to provide a check on government and the courts. So once the documents were made available to The Courant, the newspaper was free to publish the information.
Now, if anyone might be in violation of a court order, it could be the person or persons who provided the documents, which were sealed at the diocese’s request. But how and why these documents – 2,000 to 3,000 pages, I understand – ended up in the hands of a Courant reporter, I don’t know.
“Obviously, someone close to the case” provided the documents, said Brian Toolan, The Courant’s editor. “This is a source and we choose to protect the identity of the source. … The value of the readers having a complete sense of how the information was obtained is more than offset, at least in my mind and in this case, by the anonymity the source must be extended and the damage the source confronts if the anonymity is lost.”
The fact is, only a few people in the newsroom know who that source is. That’s another precept of journalism: Reporters sometimes have to rely on confidential sources, sources only the reporter and his or her editor know. Of course, they and The Courant’s top editors, in consultation with the company’s lawyer in some cases, are obligated to determine whether the source’s information is valid and whether the motives of the source help or impede the good of a story. Confidential sources aren’t and shouldn’t be taken lightly.
“My preference would be that all sources of information be identified,” Toolan said. “When we rely on anonymous sources, we do it with much thought and care, and we do it rarely. But giving anonymity to a source is an acceptable journalistic act, if that is the only way critical, essential information can be obtained. The real value is in the information we deliver to our readers, who can then use it to decide how they feel about public people and issues.”
Still, the callers early last week asked how The Courant could print such hurtful information about such a revered institution given that the diocese acknowledged the abuses and condemned them a year ago. After all, the few pedophiles embarrassing the Catholic Church are not representative of the thousands of upstanding men in its leadership.
But it’s clear as the sexual abuse scandal rolls from diocese to diocese and the settlement sums rise that the system of secrets and coverups failed some vulnerable people. It’s just impossible to ignore the abuse of power.
