Not so fast, you pack of media jackals. Jack Shafer at Slate says the crimes apparently committed by HP's investigators are nothing reporters don't do every day.
You'll recall that HP's contractors actively impersonated nine journalists and multiple HP board members. They used their victims' Social Security numbers to persuade telephone companies to set up online billing, then logged in to pillage their private phone records.
Shafer acknowledges this is all "very naughty," but says journalists come within a hair of practicing the same tactics all the time, and really shouldn't be making a big stink about it. "[M]any of the pretenses reporters adopt come very close to the deceptions said to be perpetrated by HP's hired guns."
This is great news for me. If, as Shafer implies, hacking is now an accepted journalistic practice, you can expect a lot more scoops from this reporter.
On closer examination, though, it turns out Shafer's claims are specious. Here are the journalistic practices he's comparing to HP's felonies.
Shafer also tells the story of CBS veteran Bob Schieffer, who, in his days as a young police reporter at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, became so adept at blending in with the detectives he covered that people would mistake him for a cop -- an error he passively encouraged to help his reporting.
That would have been, what, 1960? But Shafer insists the same shenanigans are commonplace today.
But the gulf between what Shafer is describing, and what HP did, is enormous. It doesn't come close the being bridged by Shafer's argument.
By default, ethical reporters today identify themselves as journalists at every stage of their reporting. But sometimes there's no other way for an investigative reporter to get an important story other than to go "undercover." Before this happens, the decision is going to be vetted by editors/producers, if not lawyers, and the reporter's methods are going to be fully revealed in the resulting report.
From the Society of Professional Journalists ethics code:
And lets be clear: these "undercover" reports -- what Shafer calls "brazen misrepresentation of identity" -- means a reporter is temporarily withholding the fact that he or she is a reporter.
It takes quite an imagination to put that in the same category as masquerading as an investigatory subject and illegally hacking into their phone records.
Schieffer also thinks the press is being disingenuous by reporting on HP's witch hunt, and ignoring what he thinks is an equally important story.
Actually, the mystery of the leaker's identity is no mystery at all because it's been in the news for a week. It's George Keyworth. Apparently he spoke to the press. But until Congress sees fit to make that a felony, don't expect the media to give it equal attention.