Richard Long: Watergate and the Doone case are worlds apart

Opinion

Gavin Ellis seemed to miss the wood for the trees in his argument about the absolute need for journalists and their media outlets to protect their sources.

As he noted, the requirement to protect confidential sources is both a written and unwritten rule.

It is written in the sense that it is stated in the Code of Principles of the New Zealand Press Council. It is an unwritten code among journalists all round the world. If necessary, reporters have been prepared to go to jail rather than break confidences.

However, these principles are based on the need to protect whistleblowers uncovering conspiracies and dastardly deeds within a Government, and occasionally in the private sector. Without protection, much of this activity would not come to light and the public would lose.

Ellis (see link below) noted the benchmark case for this: Deep Throat, the primary source in the Watergate saga, which unseated an American President, who should not have been undertaking such nefarious activities to shore up his Administration.

But there is an enormous difference between these examples and the case involving the Prime Minister, the Sunday Star-Times and former Police Commissioner Peter Doone.

Court documents indicate Helen Clark confirmed five times to the newspaper that Mr Doone used a certain phrase to a police constable when the constable stopped a car driven by Mr Doone's partner.

According to the documents, Helen Clark privately encouraged the newspaper to continue its pursuit of Mr Doone, even when he had publicly denied using the phrase and announced his intention to sue the newspaper for defamation.

It is no secret that Helen Clark and her Administration wanted to be rid of the commissioner. Her private, off-the-record conversations with the newspaper were no doubt aimed at hastening this process.

The trouble is that there is no evidence the phrase she was confirming was ever uttered by the commissioner. In other words, she was confirming, repeatedly, something which appears to have been incorrect and which was hugely damaging to the individual concerned.

The convention of protection of sources (the Prime Minister, in this case) cannot possibly come into play in this case. It cannot be argued that Helen Clark was uncovering a grave injustice, a conspiracy, or dastardly deeds that needed to be exposed for the public good.

Indeed, the only person to benefit from Helen Clark's confidential briefings was the Prime Minister herself. To argue that she should, in these circumstances, be covered by the convention of confidentiality of sources is untenable.

To do so would be to have the media conspire in a massive cover-up of a grave injustice. The media would be conspiring with the most powerful person in the land who had misused her powers against an individual and in the process misled a newspaper, its readers and caused the individual personal damage.

That is not what the convention stands for.

* Richard Long is a former editor of the Dominion. Like Gavin Ellis, he is a former chairman of the New Zealand section of the Commonwealth Press Union and a former chairman of the editors' press freedom committee. He is chief of staff for National Party leader Don Brash.