We've been working on the first amendment case research paper, and the case that I chose was the 1971 Case of New York Times v. United States. In this case, the New York Times published 4,000 pages of classified documents relating to the Vietnam War, dubbed the Pentagon Papers. They acquired the papers through a former white house employee who stole and leaked it to the New York Times.
This made me wonder, what should news publications publish? Is it morally/ethically right for them to publish these papers even if they were stolen from the White House? Does the public have the right to know what their government is doing?
I personally think that news publications not only have the right to publish what they want (The Supreme Court agrees) but also should publish these things. I believe that news journalism should be a way to give the public information that they would have previously never had access to, or would have a hard time accessing. News publications, in my opinion, have this responsibility. To me, even if these papers are stolen, they still have the responsibility to publish it, so that they can adequately inform the public.
But what do you guys think? I'm interested to hear what ya'll say.
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ReplyDeleteI agree with you that news publications and channels have the responsibility to publish or reveal what they want to inform the public. Very recently a news journalist for MSNBC, Rachel Meadow, illegally acquired Donald Trump's tax returns in hopes that he payed little to no taxes to prove his/her point, only to find that Trump payed a lot in taxes. I thought that was informative.
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