WikiLeaks can leave you lost in a moral maze

Be clear, right from the start. Any editor presented with a quarter of a million US State Department documents on a WikiLeaks plate has a duty to sift, check – and publish. Newspapers exist to get news into print, not shilly-shally around as pompous (and, alas, often American) champions of the public's right not to know too much. And if, thus far, the most unexpected story of the lot is Washington's inability to keep its diplomatic traffic secret, that's a public service, too.
But clarity, of course, strays into moral mazes as it goes along. The multimedia boss of the Daily Mirror talks about phone hacking in his blog and wonders whether handling hundreds of thousands of stolen memos is really any different. Other bloggers join the chorus. You wait, perhaps, for the Information Commissioner to decide that what Mervyn King told the American ambassador about Messrs Cameron and Osborne (or what Prince Andrew told a noisy dinner party somewhere in the middle of Asia) is information he thinks should be shielded from view.
To which the simple answer is that rules only take you so far. There is a clear public interest in printing most of what's being published by WikiLeaks and its partner papers – though not always in portraying it as high-level decision-making, as opposed to low-level ambassadorial gossip. Diplomats cultivate journalists who tell them things, just as journalists do the other way around. Grosvenor Square's damning verdict on a "rudderless" Gordon Brown might have been a Polly Toynbee column for the Guardian – and probably was.
But is all this different in kind (and in law) from private eyes paid for by the News of the World listening to phone messages on princely mobiles? The detective who did the bugging, and the reporter who paid him, went to prison. Are Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, currently facing arrest in Sweden over alleged sex offences, and Bradley Manning, the US army private charged with dishing the dirt, in a somehow purer situation?
I'd hate to argue it in court. I'd hate to maintain that Sarkozy's temperament or Berlusconi's raddled lifestyle comes with public interest umbilically attached – or that what the US embassy in Moscow says about Russia's "mafia state" could never get the libel eagles circling.
I'd balk, too, at defining the difference between a general trawl through private phone records in search of a story and a matching trawl through 250,000 classified documents in search of something newsworthy.
At which point – casting aside assorted bits of legislation, editing codes and sheaves of moral guidance – a more basic test applies. Do you, printing the WikiLeaks bumper bundle, feel queasy or certain you're trying to do the right thing? How would you feel if you didn't print them? And, equally, would you feel chastened, angry, maybe ashamed, if your telephone hacking exploits were laid out to the full by Private Eye?
Feeling matters hugely in journalism. Feeling is often what unites reporters in red-top land with their loftier brothers up the reading scale. And feeling, here, is another word for instinct. Instinct is what drives the best instant decisions – and puts too much pettifogging purity to shame.

Posted in: Wiki Leaks