Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin writes in a New York Times Oped that “journalists shouldn’t help the Sony hackers” by publishing the stolen material. WNPR/Courant columnist Colin McEnroe responds in Salon (and if you watched HBO’s “Newsroom” and wanted to like it but couldn’t, you’ll find you’re not alone):
Here’s the thing about journalism. It’s messy. There’s breakage. The good practitioners try to keep that to a minimum, but we’ll never get it down to zero. I once worked for a newspaper editor and publisher with whom I had absolutely no rapport. In our years together, he said exactly one thing that made any sense to me: “We’re not in the business of knowing stuff that we don’t tell people.” The corollary: we don’t need a good reason to tell people something. We need an extremely good reason when we don’t.
