The right of journalists not to disclose their sources and the new media

Abstract

This chapter deals with the issue of whether the right of journalists not to disclose their sources should be extended to protect the various ‘citizen journalists’ of the New Media. After expounding some jurisprudential attempts to confront this issue in the USA and after tracing the restrictive tendencies in the available instruments of the Council of Europe, this chapter examines and criticizes a recent attempt to escape this problem focusing on the ‘source’ rather than on the ‘journalist’. Returning back to the traditional context of the debate, in its last section, this chapter proposes an enlargement of the traditional concept of ‘journalist’ to provide protection to all persons who disseminate information to the public through the use of New Media, provided that these persons had the intent to do so (i.e. to disseminate information) already at the inception of the information-gathering process.