When journalists investigate private businesses for wrongdoing, or upcoming products, or rumors, etc., do they commit corporate espionage? By “corporate espionage” (or “industrial espionage”), I mean simply when one business attempts to obtain information about another business for competitive gain.

Journalists usually work for privately-held media. Learning about other companies helps journalists against their competition by spawning fresh, potentially exclusive, stories to go on their websites or into their newspapers.

• Journalists could argue that they provide a public service.

  Probably, but:

  • That doesn’t necessarily cancel out their engaging in business-against-business intelligence work.

  • Couldn’t the businesses that journalists investigate also argue, under the dominant ideology in this country, that they provide a public service by offering goods in the marketplace? If so, do they contribute better public services than do journalists?

• Journalists could argue that, if the corporation is clearly harming the public, then the journalist has a stronger moral claim to investigate them.

  But, journalists can’t know about the corporation’s harm until after their investigation. Their investigation could demonstrate that the reporter’s hunch was incorrect, in which case we would have to go back to whose public service was greater.

Does it matter whether journalists are considered corporate spies?

If journalists coordinated with law enforcement before investigating private businesses (given that we rely on the government to watch over business otherwise), thereby working on behalf of a public agency, would their work stop being corporate espionage? [1]

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I couldn’t resist the irony of journalists recycling old editorials into new ones. This is the stuff of bad PR reps, or at least so we were taught.

Here are the opening sentences of Irwin Gratz’s editorial. Gratz was SPJ president in 2004-05:

Regardless of whether you believe anonymous sources are overused or not, there’s little denying reporters sometime need to promise confidentiality. Some of the greatest investigative stories of our age have relied on them.

Now read the opening sentences to Christine Tatum’s editorial. Tatum was SPJ president in 2006-07:

Regardless of whether you think journalists use too many anonymous sources, it’s hard to argue that they don’t need to promise confidentiality sometimes. Many of the biggest investigative stories of our age have been based in part on information shared with a reporter by someone who wanted to keep his or her identity a secret.

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