The recent theft of private documents belonging to Twitter management and their publication by a major blog could herald direction of online journalism: One that may turn out to be unethical and self-indulgent.
“Publish and be damned!” attributed to the Duke of Wellington when he heard that a courtesan had threatened to publish her memoirs and his letters.
Have you ever received e-mail meant for someone else? With the huge migration to electronic communications, misdirected documents have become commonplace and, as many have found out, once you commit something to bits rather than atoms you loose control of the content.
Anyway, if you have received documents not meant for you, did you read them and learn something you weren’t meant to know? And here’s the big question: what did you do about it?
Assuming the contents were private and personal (as in “none of your dang business”), and if you did indeed read the documents and there was nothing illegal in the content, then surely a mature, responsible and honorable person would simply delete the e-mail and forget about the contents. Right?
Let’s also say you know other people also erroneously got the same messages. Does that change your ethical position so you can now spill the beans? I don’t think so.
I bring this up because of a curious story that broke a few days ago. The tale concerns the Twitter service and the TechCrunch blog and involves some 300 documents belonging to Twitter. These documents were stolen by a French hacker who broke into an e-mail account belonging to a Twitter staff member.
The hacker was planning to make the messages public but first he sent them to TechCrunch and this is where I think the story becomes unethical and also gets rather odd: Michael Arrington, CEO of TechCrunch, immediately blogged about getting the messages and wrote “We’ve spent most of the evening reading these documents. The vast majority of them are somewhat embarrassing to various individuals, but not otherwise interesting. … But we are going to release some of the documents showing financial projections, product plans and notes from executive strategy meetings.”
Arrington added: “We’re also going to post the original pitch document for the Twitter TV show that hit the news in May, mostly because it’s awesome.” Awesome? Really? That’s how you justify publishing the contents of a stolen private document?
Arrington wrote “it certainly was unethical, or at least illegal or tortious, for the person who gave us the information and violated confidentiality and/or nondisclosure agreements. But on our end, it’s simply news.”
So, “simply news” was their justification for publishing the stolen documents? With that nonsense TechCrunch crossed the line from ethical to unethical and from real journalism (which TechCrunch does very well) to gutter journalism (which no one should want to do at all).
I think this kind of behavior does a huge discredit to the world of journalism. This wasn’t Watergate. No one had done anything wrong, and just because the documents TechCrunch exposed might be made public and weren’t injurious to individuals, that isn’t a reasonable justification for public disclosure.
Now for the weird part: Twitter’s lawyers and TechCrunch legal counsel apparently locked horns and went through some kind of negotiation over what should and should not be published. Arrington wrote, “We’ve spent much of the last 36 hours talking directly to Twitter about the right way to go about doing that.” I find it strange that there’s a “right way” to act badly.
Perhaps this is what the future of online journalism in general and tech journalism will look like. Publish and be damned indeed.
