I was a panelist Sunday on the recording of This Week in Tech , Leo Laporte’s popular technology news podcast. Also on the panel was Christina Warren , a senior tech analyst at Mashable, who last week wrote a lengthy story about how Sony Pictures mishandled the development of the film based on Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography .
Warren based her story on emails culled from the recent hacking of Sony Pictures’ computer systems by a group that calls itself the Guardians of Peace that may or may not have ties to North Korea . The perpetrators got deep into Sony’s servers, and have dumped hundreds of gigabytes of data – emails, personnel records, contracts and whole movies. Much of the info in Warren’s story had already leaked – Hollywood is a notoriously leaky sieve – but she included verbatim emails from the hackers’ trove to confirm much of what we already knew about Sony’s bungling of the property, which it subsequently sold to Universal .
The ethics of mining stolen information for news stories has long been a source of controversy for journalists and their critics. Some of the most dramatic news stories of the modern age have come from this, ranging from the Pentagon Papers to the information released by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Of course, there’s a big difference between the serious issues of policy in those two examples and the machinations involved in trying to a movie deal done.
Laporte pressed Warren on the ethics of reporting using the stolen Sony material, and you can watch the exchange in the video below. The discussion begins at the 12:17 mark in the 2-hour podcast.
Also weighing in on the issue was Aaron Sorkin, who Sony hired to write the screenplay from the Isaacson biography. Sorkin, the celebrated force between TV shows like “The West Wing” and “The Newsroom” (which closed its three-season run on HBO Sunday night ) and the writer for films such as “The Social Network”, penned an op-ed in the New York Times in which he offered no quarter for journalists like Warren:
As a screenwriter in Hollywood who’s only two generations removed from probably being blacklisted, I’m not crazy about Americans calling other Americans un-American, so let’s just say that every news outlet that did the bidding of the Guardians of Peace is morally treasonous and spectacularly dishonorable.
I know there’s juicy stuff in the emails and I know some of us have been insulted and I know there’s more to come. No one’s private life can totally withstand public scrutiny. But this is much bigger than hurt feelings and banged-up egos.
If you close your eyes you can imagine the hackers sitting in a room, combing through the documents to find the ones that will draw the most blood. And in a room next door are American journalists doing the same thing. As demented and criminal as it is, at least the hackers are doing it for a cause. The press is doing it for a nickel.
Of course, Sorkin has a dog in the hunt, so you’d expect his feelings to be strong. But referring to journalists mining the trove for stories as “morally treasonous and spectacularly dishonorable” is a bit over the top.
I’ve got mixed feelings about this. I think journalists have every right to examine available documents for newsworthy items, but the question is whether what’s in the Sony documents rises to that test. News, of course, is whatever interests the public, and in the Internet age that bar has yet to hit bottom.
It’s also fluid. News that’s compelling to me may be boring, pointless or annoying to you, and vice versa.
What do you think? Let us know in the comments.
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