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Comment by TomOfTTB | Hacker News Reader

Simply put once a news source starts omitting facts based on what they think is relevant that's the beginning of the end. News sources should report the facts in as complete a fashion as they are capable of doing. To do otherwise is to open the door to abuse. What's to stop a reporter from leaving a friend out of a story while reporting his coworkers were involved in some malfeasance? In that case the coworkers then look more guilty in comparison to their unmentioned friend who appears innocent because he wasn't reported in the story. That's just one example of how omitting facts can lead to dishonesty in reporting

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Omitting irrelevant facts is the whole point of news publishers in the informaton age. You don't pay them to find information, you pay them to filter information.

The mistake you make is in assuming your judgement of what is irrelevant is sacrosanct. Again I give an example...

Let's say a Conservative reporter is in Iraq and for whatever reason he's the only reporter allowed there. Let's say he finds out that there were no WMD but says to himself "That's irrelevant because President Bush thought there were WMD so there's no reason for me to report on that". Would that be right?

Of course not. But the reason we have rules against reporters using their judgement to omit details is because it leads to situations like the above.

Now back to this situation. I'm not saying this is true I'm just putting forth a possibility. That said what if this is a person who serially does things like this? What if he could be linked to several leaks over the past few years? Wouldn't his name be relevant then? But how could you know if that was the case if reporters decided to omit his name every time he was involved? That's just one example of how this one fact that you think is irrelevant could in fact be very relevant

There are many journalists in Iraq. And you know why that is? Because if there were only one of them, he might make wrong judgments. Yeah, there might be wrong judgments when humans are involved, no one could disagree with that. The way out, however, is not to force journalists to report everything, the way out is to make sure there are always a good many journalists writing about the same stuff.

Journalists have to make judgments all the time, they have to decide which parts of a story are important and which parts are irrelevant. If they didn’t do that – if they weren’t allowed to do that – they wouldn’t do their job. Reporting whatever you hear and see is not what being a journalist means.

You can have nice arguments about which judgments are the right ones, which are the wrong ones. Saying that Gizmodo should just report whatever they know is not such a argument.

(You actually start to make the right kind of argument in your last paragraph which is nice but I don’t see how there is any evidence at all that hints at the scenario you are describing. There are always many things which are possible but that’s hardly a convincing argument. Evidence is what’s needed.)

Note please, that the New York Times [1] doesn’t mention the name. Apple engineer is all they write.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/technology/companies/20app...

The question is whether naming the guy contributed anything to the story and was in the public interest, or whether it was a purely vindictive action by Gizmodo. Considering the fact that the main story is the existence of the prototype and that it's authenticity has already been confirmed by Apple's response, I'd say it was the latter. Revealing the guy's identity added nothing to the story, unlike in your example where the lack of WMDs would be the story.

Gizmodo have chosen to not only imperil this guy's current job with Apple but also his future career prospects. First by providing a market for stolen Apple secrets and being a willing buyer and publisher of the prototype and its details and second by splashing his name all over the internet. Count me amongst those who will boycott Gizmodo and all other Gawker sites from now on.

I believe the press has the freedom to print whatever they want so long as they are following first amendment rights. I feel neutral to the entire situation. Of course it's crappy that the guy's identity was outed but at the same time it was completely within Gizmodo's rights to do so. For that I am voting you backup.

So news articles about sexual abuse should include the name, age and address of the victim? After all, who is to say it is not relevant to the story.

There are laws against reporting those names for that very reason. Because there is an ethical obligation by reporters to report all the facts and we as society have decided reporting those details isn't acceptable so we restrict them from reporting those details. Just as we do with the names of children.

But the very existence of those laws proves the point I was making which is that reporters should be bound to report all details. Not the other way around

So we've established that there is a continuum between reporting all the facts and reporting none of them. As we've said, legally reporters are bound to stand at one point on this continuum (report most facts, but no names of abuse victims, no names of children in the police blotter, etc). It is a reasonable belief that ethically reporters are bound to stand at another point closer to reporting less facts, including omitting the name of someone who lost company property.

There's no proving or disproving points here, as you seem to think. It is a valid belief that ethically the name of the engineer should not have been reported. You might not share this belief, but it is a valid belief to have and it cannot be disproved. Your ethics are simply different.

"Simply put once a news source starts omitting facts based on what they think is relevant that's the beginning of the end."

Well, then apparently the beginning of the end was the beginning of journalism. This is done all the time.

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