Source or too Close?

How close is too close? At some point for those of us to pursue a career in journalism, we’ll have to ask that question about our sources.
Reporters working beats in big cities might not struggle so much: we ring up someone for an interview, write 10-12 inches and send the copy away. Some situations don’t call for much deliberation.

Telemundo’s L.A. political reporter Mirthala Salinas had an affair with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. During that affair she reported on politics and even announced on air when he separated from his wife of 20-years.
Telemundo placed her on leave last month pending an investigation into whether she violated journalism ethics.
Nelson Poynter Scholar for Journalism Values, Bob Steele weighed in.
“The principle of independence is essential to the credibility of reporting on government officials,” Steele wrote in a Poynter column. “That independence is jeopardized when a journalist has a personal relationship with someone she or he covers. Competing loyalties, if not properly and ethically handled, can erode the integrity of the journalist and of the journalist’s news organization.”
But most reporter-source predicaments aren’t so easily judged.

Covering news in a small Oregon town, I’ve often asked, “how close is too close?”
And it’s not always an easy answer. Consider the story of a 5-year-old Chinese orphan who thought life would be grand when she was adopted by two prominent symphony musicians. Instead she lived out her pre-teen years in squalor, in a locked house without a phone, amid molding feces, overflowing toilets, floors stained with animal urine, mouse carcasses, broken refrigerators stuffed with rotting food that swarmed with bugs and dripped onto the floor.
I trespassed to visit the girl when her mother was gone. But my editor and the publisher agreed to print the story in spite of almost-certain litigation. Before running the story, the girls’ adopted older brother secreted her over to our newspaper, where she told my boss the same thing she told me – she had been physically and emotionally abused and neglected by her adopted mother.
My boss called child protective services (an agency that knew about the girl’s condition for years and failed to take action). He told her the girl was being abused, that we were running the story the following day and should take her out of the house. He also called the local sheriff.
We were furious with the state, with her mother, with the sheriff’s department for not taking action to protect the girl. But should my boss have called child services? Was that getting “too close” to the story?

Before being journalists, we must be human. We must connect with our sources on a deeper level, do more than make a phone call, more than rewrite a press release.
If we want to incite emotion from our readers, we must open ourselves to feel.
We can do all of that and still remain ethical, still maintain professional boundaries. Sometimes we forget that. And it’s just too bad.

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