An ethical quandary and our attempt to solve it
by Lynn Walsh on Jul.06, 2010, under Video, What's New
A story produced for Texas Watchdog:
An ethical quandary and our attempt to solve it
Thu Jul 1 20:01:00 2010 CST
By Trent SeibertTexas Watchdog regularly posts clips to YouTube from Houston Independent School District meetings, which video journalist Lynn Walsh covers.
Last month, we got a request from HISD. Because of a technical difficulty, the district’s staff were unable to produce their usual in-house video of a June meeting of school district trustees, which the school system would normally save for archival purposes and make available to citizens who requested copies. Our reporter was at that meeting, doing some recording for our news website — could HISD have a copy of our footage, the school system asked?
That created a dilemma for us – one that we’re going to try to solve with this blog post.
On one hand, Texas Watchdog fully supports government transparency. We want citizens to be able to access recordings of what HISD trustees do. And certainly, as reporters, we can sympathize with HISD’s situation — we’ve all had tape recorders die, or their batteries die, in the middle of some important interview.
But here’s the tricky part: The idea of a news organization freely turning over unpublished material – whether it’s a recording or handwritten reporter’s notes – at the request of a government agency could set a terrible legal precedent, not only for us, but other news organizations.
We’d like to help HISD make its actions transparent to the public – and helping the school system might seem totally innocent and laudable to many of our readers. But imagine it’s not HISD making the request – imagine the next request comes from the police department, or FBI agents. And the tape isn’t a recording of a school board meeting. It’s video of a crime scene.
Journalists have gone to jail in this country to prevent being forced to turn over unpublished material in such situations. And Texas’ new first-ever reporter shield law, the Free Flow of Information Act, was created in the last session of the legislature to stop just such things. We don’t want to turn over our recording to HISD and set a bad example that is later used in court by some other government entity to argue that journalists somehow don’t mind giving out their source material – and that reporters at Texas Watchdog, or The Houston Chronicle, or KPRC-Channel 2 shouldn’t mind turning over their notes, too.
(Just to be clear, HISD asked us for the footage, and asked nicely. The school system at no time ever threatened us or threatened to force us to give up our video. And this note is not intended to suggest that HISD had any ulterior motive in asking us for the recording. We don’t have anything personally against HISD. We’re just trying to explain our thought process.)
In other words, we don’t feel like we can give HISD our meeting footage. But we are willing to try an alternative.
We’re not giving our meeting footage to HISD – we’re giving it to all of you, the reading public. We are posting on our YouTube page more footage than usual of the June meeting, where anyone with an Internet connection may access it, including HISD.
The clips are linked below:
An audio track from the meetingContact Trent Seibert at trent@texaswatchdog.org or 713-980-9776.
