On dangerous protection

Thomas Walkom points out that last week's decision quashing search warrants against Ottawa Citizen reporter Juliet O'Neill may not have wound up protecting a particularly merit-worthy journalistic source:

Amidst the media self-congratulation over an Ontario Superior Court judge's decision this week to uphold freedom of the press, one fact is rarely mentioned: The substance of the Ottawa Citizen report at the centre of this controversy was inaccurate.

What's more, if an earlier judicial inquiry can be believed, whoever leaked the information — or more properly disinformation — reported in the Citizen was trying to discredit Maher Arar, someone who had already been unjustly maligned, imprisoned and tortured.

Is this really a press victory?...

Most journalists, including this writer, make use of anonymous sources. We try to verify what they say. But ultimately — particularly in areas where hard evidence is difficult to come by — we have to rely on faith that they are telling the truth.

Unfortunately, sometimes they are not. The 2003 Citizen story was one of those cases.

Some of what her anonymous sources provided to O'Neill did turn out to be accurate. Justice Dennis O'Connor's inquiry into the Arar matter concluded that the Canadian computer engineer did indeed come to Mounties' attention when they spotted him talking to someone they had under surveillance.

But O'Connor also concluded there was absolutely no basis in fact to the more sensational allegations repeated in the Citizen piece. He said Arar was never a jihadist, that he was not linked to Al Qaeda, that he had not trained in an Afghan terrorist camp and that he had not "disappeared" from Canada to avoid being interviewed by the RCMP...

When O'Neill's story broke, the RCMP — to their credit — were desperate to discover who was leaking this damaging disinformation. But their subsequent raid on O'Neill's home raised such a storm that the then-Liberal government felt compelled to call the judicial inquiry it had been trying to avoid. (It was that raid that Justice Lynn Ratushny, citing freedom of the press, declared unconstitutional on Thursday).

Of course, in future cases it's quite possible that the decision will wind up assisting sources whose information more thoroughly deserves protection, and helping to strengthen the ability of the press to investigate wrongdoing. And there's no doubt that this is one of the areas where the knee-jerk reaction to 9/11 may have gone too far.

But as pointed out by Walkom, the story is far from one-sided. It's not hard to see the similarities between this story and the U.S. Judith Miller fiasco in which "journalistic integrity" was cited as a reason to avoid outing even sources whose information had been entirely disproven. And if the effect of Ratushny's decision is to strengthen confidentiality between propagandists and the journalists who use their information for easy stories rather than for the sake of actually investigating, it's hard to see who besides the purveyors of misinformation could stand to gain in the long run.