Is It Worth Shielding?

Journalism standards are sometimes loose, but the very least that every publication owes its audience is an assurance that nothing that it reports is made up. That assurance is conspicuously missing in the current legal controversy over the Journal of the American Medical Assn. and its publication of an anonymous essay purportedly written by a gynecology resident who administered a lethal dose of morphine to a dying 20-year-old cancer patient whom he, or she, had never before treated.

Where murder is concerned--and it is clear to us that, if the essay is true, it’s a homicide confession, not a defense of euthanasia--it may seem prissy to talk about the standards of journalism. But in our view it matters very much whether the essay is fact or fiction. That is because the AMA, in fighting a subpoena from the Cook County prosecutor for documents that would reveal the identity of the essay’s author, is invoking the First Amendment and the Illinois Reporter’s Privilege Act, a statute designed to shield journalists from revealing their confidential sources. Fiction writers and their publishers have no business invoking either.

The reason courts and state legislatures are willing to back up journalists who refuse to reveal their sources is that there is a general recognition that some sources would not speak to a reporter without a promise of confidentiality; ultimately the free flow of ideas and the search for the truth that are supposed to be fostered by the First Amendment would suffer. But if a story is fabricated, how does it contribute to the search for the truth?

George Lundberg, the editor of the AMA Journal, says that he knows who wrote the essay, which arrived unsolicited at his office, but has never verified whether the mercy killing ever occurred. His lawyers concede that “it is quite possible that (the essay) is a complete or partial fabrication.” And many physicians are skeptical that such an event could have happened: They say that the morphine dose was not large enough to kill, that the morphine would have been missed from the pharmacy, that nurses on duty would have known what happened.

We are not competent to pass on such medical issues, but we do know irresponsible editing when we see it. Before the AMA Journal puts Illinois to the trouble of extensive court hearings over the complicated legal question of whether the public’s interest in a debate over euthanasia outweighs the threat to the First Amendment caused by divulging sources, its editors ought to make certain that they have something worth shielding. Otherwise, many people may conclude that they are only trying to spare themselves embarrassment.