Every once in a while, this job presents an impossible choice. This was one of those times. 

Last Monday afternoon, Leigh Tauss called to tell me about something she’d learned earlier that day. A source had contacted her and asked her if she wanted a tip about something newsworthy that was going to happen at the next day’s Raleigh City Council meeting. This item wasn’t on the agenda, the source said. But the source would give us a heads-up on the condition was that she’d keep the information off the record until the meeting. 

Tauss agreed. 

These kinds of embargoes aren’t uncommon in this business. They allow you to do some reporting ahead of time. But they’re usually tied to a document—a lawsuit about to be filed, a report that’s about to come out, something like that. This, Tauss learned, was different. 

The source told her—and then provided documents—that the city council would vote to eliminate its 19 citizen advisory councils. It would do this with no public notice or debate because that might be inconvenient; a backlash had derailed previous efforts to reform the CAC system. I had a dilemma. 

The rules of journalism are clear: Things that are off the record are off the record. To breach that agreement is unethical. Journalists have been sued for doing so; more important, it severs trust between a reporter and their sources, and a reporter is only as good as their sources. 

On the other hand: This was a matter of public interest. The city council was doing something shady, we knew about it, and I felt we had an obligation to put it out into the world. To not do so felt like a different kind of breach of trust.  

I tried to find a loophole that would allow us to publish early or an ethical way out of the deal; no dice. It came down honoring the agreement Tauss had made, or not. Had it been my agreement, perhaps I would have burned the source. But it wasn’t my source to burn. So, as agreed, we waited.

The whole thing disgusted me. If you care about transparency, it should disgust you, too. 

Contact editor in chief Jeffrey C. Billman at [email protected]. 

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