Is harm just the threat of physical violence? Losing your job? Your life becoming a feeding frenzy for ludicrous (frequently salacious) tabloid interest? Losing your pension as you approach retirement? Or even political/electoral suicide?

More nuance is clearly required. And what is ‘public interest’? Judges don’t know, journalists don’t know, heck even the public would be hard pressed to tell you. It’s the old debate: ‘what is the public interested in’ v ‘what is in the public interest’. Can we or should we ever conflate them?

["There’s absolutely no reason for the accepted convention among British journalists to agree to anonymise press officers and PR flunkies."]

Again, i agree. But it must follow that there is also no reason for American journalists to agree to anonymise press officers and PR flunkies. It’s not even a stretch to find them doing this every day on ‘respectable’ news outlets, so it’s unfair to attack the unfortunates working for British papers.

Egregious example no 1: The Wall Street Journal happily plugged Apple’s then to be announced gadget based on anonymous sources. If these “people briefed with the company” and “people briefed on the matter” were not Apple PR flunkies then i am a walnut whip.

I can offer more. But this is a blog reply, not an essay!

See Here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703580904574638630584151614.html
Apple to Ship Tablet…(Jan 5)

There’s absolutely no reason for the accepted convention among British journalists to agree to anonymise press officers and PR flunkies.

Two words: Woodward and Bernstein. They fetishised the use of anonymous sources and, like every other area, we have quickly followed the American lead. Watch American news or read one of their newspapers. The Internet lets us do this! They remain full of “a high level source”, “a source familiar with events” or “senior White House official”.

Which takes us neatly to Judith Miller and the New York Times. She sold America a crock of you know what. Her sources were, er, high level and unnamed. Well, at least until they later became public. A direct line from the White House. Who would have thunk it? But then the US media would never fall for that trick would it? That bastion of quality reporting that let the world slide to the brink of disaster on so many fronts with Mr Bush at the wheel.

A smart 15 year old could do a take-down of the hypocrisy of the Sun, Star or Daily Mail. Or the New York Times for that matter. You have to work a little harder than Brooker’s programme. But then that calls for glib and black and white argument doesn’t it? Why squander your good reputation doing something like this?

I would hope given your valuable push for freedom of speech and attacks on secrecy that these comments will be allowed to start a debate.