Protect sources or liberty will suffer

Hutton concerned a BBC “one on one” interview, that is, where one journalist interviews another journalist. In this, Andrew Gilligan claimed that the Blair Government had probably known that a statement in a public document justifying the intervention in Iraq was untrue. Gilligan said this was based on a well placed confidential source, who turned out to be Dr David Kelly.

Kelly’s subsequent suicide forced the Blair Government to initiate the inquiry. But Gilligan, whose reliance on a confidential source had not been cleared by his program producer, later admitted that Kelly had said no such thing. Hutton was highly critical of the BBC for not insisting on proper editorial supervision.

US “best practice” requires that both the editor and the journalist know the identity of the source. As a precondition of the grant of statutory protection, it is reasonable to require that there should at least have been a separate editorial assessment of the proposed reliance on a confidential source. I am not suggesting that a court should review the quality of that assessment - that would involve an endless hearing - rather that a separate assessment should have taken place.

As the European Court pointed out, without legal protection, sources will not always come forward, and the public’s right to information will be reduced. We need strong statutes to ensure this, not only federal but also state and territory. There is no need for these to be uniform, just that each observe a minimum standard consistent with the free flow of information in our democracy.