New challenges, old ethics

A woman who identified herself as a parent called the newsroom Monday to tell us we should read a certain comment left on our Web site.

Someone using the name of the West High School student arrested three days earlier on suspicion of making a bomb threat, making terrorist threats and creating a disturbance on a school campus had posted something that looked to be another threat.

“I was the one who set the bomb up,” the comment read. “The bomb is still located inside the school. To tell you the truth, there is more than one bomb. I set one inside the clock tower and another inside the school district.”

Online comments are uncharted terrain, as we’ve found in the less-than-two months since we’ve added this challenging function to our newspaper Web site.

Information, however, is nothing new for us. The job of newspapers is to gather news and information, and sometimes that information arrives unsolicited, as it does in the online comments.

Rarely, though, does information put us in the kind of situation it did Monday, where we find ourselves becoming part of the story that we also have to cover.

When we read the comment at 1:30 p.m. Monday — about 10 minutes after it was posted, as it turns out — we called Tracy Unified School District Superintendent Jim Franco and faxed a copy of the comment to his district office, which contacted the police.

Then we drove to West High with cameras and notebooks in hand. School had let out at 1:30 p.m., so there were few students milling about. We waited about 15 minutes before we noticed Franco and a campus security guard looking inside the clock tower.

Two hours later, long after the threat to public safety had presumably passed, the police called to ask us for a copy of the e-mail address that had accompanied the comment.

Until this point, everything we’d provided to the school district had been information made public on our Web site, except for the Internet Protocol address, which showed that the comment had been made using the school’s computers.

I called a newspaper attorney in Sacramento to talk about whether we should give up the e-mail address, something I’ve told readers in the past would not be shared.

Telling the police that we wouldn’t give up the unpublished information without a subpoena isn’t all that different from demanding a search warrant before letting an investigator onto private property. Of course, even with a court-issued subpoena, newspapers legally don’t have to give up unpublished information.

Why?

All unpublished content — photos, reporters’ notes, tapes, data, eyewitness observations, unnamed sources, e-mails and addresses — is protected in the state Constitution under the California Shield Law.

We take this legal right seriously, because it sets us apart from the government and entities we write about. It puts us on the side of the people, who provide information to us — and all media — without expecting that it will be used for something other than newsgathering.

If we’re so quick to hand over information to the police, without regard for the ethics of doing so, how can we expect the public to trust us with the information they give us in the future? We don’t want to lose that trust.

I found it interesting that William Dean Singleton’s MediaNews Group followed this news story in its San Joaquin Herald with the headline, “Police upset over response to threat.” It contained more false statements made by the reporter than truth, quoted only one side of the story and editorialized about the part the Tracy Press played in the “lost investigation time.”

MediaNews owns or controls almost every daily newspaper in the greater Bay Area, except the Tracy Press and the San Francisco Chronicle, the latter of which is owned by media giant Hearst Corp. Hearst and MediaNews’ attempt to consolidate in the last year was slapped down by an antitrust lawsuit, followed by a settlement agreement just this week.

I think it’s important for people to realize that the future of newspapers in the Bay Area under Singleton’s control isn’t just a monopoly situation. Under MediaNews, newspapers are becoming more the mouthpiece of government than the communities they serve. They have little regard for the rights of the people and the press and the laws that protect them.

Sadly, the California Shield Law has little future unless it is exercised.

Cheri Matthews, editor of the Tracy Press, can be reached by phone (830-4201) e-mail (cherim@tracypress.com) or blog (www.editor-matthews.blogspot.com).