What Do Journalists Owe Their Sources—and Their Audiences?

The relationship between journalists and their sources is at the very heart of reporting. As such, it’s always subject to controversy and ethical considerations. These questions aren’t new, but they are especially urgent now, considering the proliferation of misinformation and disinformation online, and the way that AI-generated content often separates information from its source.

Reporters have always argued about whether to use unnamed sources, the best way to protect our sources, and how transparent to be with our audiences about our sources’ identities. All of these questions become more complicated in the digital age, seldom more so than in the case of Reality Winner, the young government intelligence analyst who gave The Intercept a single classified document and, in turn, received a sixty-three-month prison sentence. The document concerned Russia’s campaign to sway the 2016 presidential election by hacking into voter registration databases in the United States; Winner thought this was something the public needed to know. She paid the price. She was indicted under the Espionage Act, pleaded guilty, and eventually was punished with the longest prison sentence ever given for leaking classified information to a media outlet: five years and three months.