“Weak? Do you really think, Arthur, that it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to. To stake all one’s life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not – there is no weakness in that. There is a horrible, a terrible courage.”
Chiltern has committed a crime. He has broken the law and flouted the moral and ethical code. In striving to be an ideal husband, he has violated the trust of people close to him and jeopardised his illustrious career. But his deliberate decision to commit the crime, combined with its positive outcomes, lead him to insist that he possesses “a horrible, a terrible courage”.
Chiltern’s fictional plight resonates with the very real one of Nick Martin-Clark. The freelance journalist committed what many reporters consider a crime by naming a source whose confidentiality he had guaranteed. The episode left the source imprisoned for at least 24 years, Martin-Clark under witness protection for life, and the media facing a number of ethical questions.
In 1996, Clifford McKeown, a member of Northern Ireland’s Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF), shot Catholic taxi driver Martin McCormick in a randomly-chosen but calculated attack in Aghagallon, Co Armagh.
Six years on, McKeown – by now a prime suspect in the murder case and in jail for another offence – swore Martin-Clark to secrecy before admitting to the killing.
Martin-Clark broke his promise and wrote about the confession in the Sunday Times. He then helped police to convict McKeown for murder by submitting tape-recordings and appearing as a prosecution witness at the trial. Martin-Clark was condemned by most reporters in Ireland and expelled from the National Union of Journalists (NUJ).
While an ideal husband should never lie, an ideal journalist should never reveal the identity of a confidential source – so goes one argument. After the 2003 Hutton Inquiry highlighted the consequences of exposing sources, for example, Tim Crook claimed that the ‘never name a source’ maxim constitutes a deontological duty, an absolute.
But journalists do not report on or in an ideal world. And when each pillar upholding a journalist’s faith in media maxims is demolished, the journalist finds it increasingly difficult to justify the rule for its own sake, under the weight of his personal conscience and ethics. This is what happened to Martin-Clark.
In McKeown’s case, many of the justifications for protecting a source could be dismissed. McKeown was a reliable primary source with direct, criminal responsibility for the information he supplied. He was likely to be the only individual able to supply the compelling forensic evidence needed to help solve McGoldrick’s murder. He had stopped cooperating with Martin-Clark’s investigation into alleged collusion during The Troubles and was unlikely to be needed as a source in future.
Martin-Clark contended that many of the key justifications for remaining silent had been eliminated. He said: “McKeown was a boastful murderer whose protection would have served no public interest after he had broken an understanding that he would provide me with further information about collusion and the LVF. There was a clear public interest in solving a murder.”
His Sunday Times colleague Liam Clarke agreed and said that Martin-Clark “considered that his duty as a citizen and his duty as a human being outweighed his duty of confidentiality.”
Clarke and Martin-Clark suggest that protecting and pandering to the requests of a brutal murderer can be professionally desirable but, in this case, goes against moral and intuitive reason.
The NUJ deemed Martin-Clarke “not a fit and proper person” to continue his membership. The union was right to oust him for revealing a source and so breaching clause seven of their Code of Conduct, but their grounds for doing so missed the mark. In fact, Martin-Clark’s sense of injustice and his empathy for McGoldrick’s widow and children, one of whom was still unborn when he died, demonstrate that the reporter’s character was not to blame.
Martin-Clark’s actions were wrong and if I was to find myself in the same position, I would not repeat them. He tarnished the credibility of journalists around the world and endangered the lives of colleagues who had earned the trust of violent, suspicious informants while working in the political instability of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. One – Martin O’Hagan – became the first reporter killed in the troubles when he was murdered in 2001 by the same LVF that killed McGoldrick.
But what Martin-Clark did was not weak. It did not show weakness of character or make him an unfit or improper person. It took “a horrible, a terrible courage” to go against the advice and feeling of the mainstream, and in so doing his actions served a purpose.
Martin-Clark’s professionalism was compromised in this case and for that he is paying with the trauma of living under a witness protection programme. But the display of his fallibility did the world of journalism a favour by conveying an important statement: that journalism is not absolute and should not deal in absolutes.
We must always be wary of absolutist stances. As Walter Lippman said, whenever you hold your positions to be “perfect examples of some eternal principle or other, you are not talking, you are fighting.” Using Lippman’s terminology, journalism involves ‘talking’, or flexible exchange, rather than rigid maxims. Journalists continually ask questions of themselves and others, making decisions that depend on the individual case and the broader, changing arena.
The relationship between reporters and sources is an exchange – a ‘talk’, not a ‘fight’ – that must remain balanced, so that sources do not possess disproportionate power over reporters. For this reason, silence should not be the default setting for reporters. Philip Meyer observed: “To many people, the silence itself is the virtue [...]. What was once rational protection of sources has become a law of journalistic omerta.” The silence of non-disclosure can convey an impression of inertia or apathy that, if taken for granted, could allow sources to taunt journalists with confidential or deceptive information that cannot be questioned in a transparent public forum due to the Mafia-like code of silence that Meyer identifies.
Of course, reporters should not possess disproportionate power over sources either, which is why Martin-Clark was in the wrong. But he did achieve, perhaps inadvertently, a demonstration of the very freedom of speech that sources enjoy and that journalism itself promotes.
Former Washington Post editor Leonard Dowie warned that journalists should never be seen as “an arm of the law”. But neither must they be seen as an arm of their sources – as spokesmen or safe houses for criminals and the corrupt. They must never become faceless machines sticking unthinkingly to a code of conduct, without compassion or subjectivity, “morally disengaged and politically inactive”.
The professional shame and real-world danger brought about by Martin-Clark should not be repeated. He defied expectations and dissented, creating uncertainty and unpredictability. But as a one-off, revealing a source served to promote debate and humanise reporting, highlighting its complexity and its dilemmas. It reminded sources not to take journalists for granted, as a decision on whether or not to reveal a source is not made in weakness, but takes a “terrible courage”.
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