Should the Sun reveal the police officer(s) who told it lis about the Hillsborough tragedy?

[Gromit]

Parliament is debating whether to release secret papers relating to the Hillsborough tragedy after an online e-petition got over 200,000 signitures.

The families of the dead also want to know they source of the Sun's infamous report which said Liverpool fans urinated on the dying (amongst other thing). The report into the tragedy for no basis of truth in the Sun's report. The information came, off the record, from police.

Should the familes be told who lied about their dead sons?


http://www.journalism...e-sources/s2/a546364/

[jno]

the individuals in these cases weren't brought to book, but the reputation of the police as a whole suffered - and so it should, because it seems, as you say, that the police as a whole were to blame, it wasn't just a rogue sergeant peddling the lies.

[Kromovaracun]

@sp: I agree, and what saddens me is that you've just picked the extreme examples. There's also the far more insidious type of much the same thing which in varying degrees turns up daily - I'm thinking especially of the virtual open-season suffered by Joanna Yates' landlord because he happened to be old and a bit weird (including vague allusions to the possibility he could have abused schoolchildren, if I remember right).

I remember once going to a Careers event on Journalism as an undergraduate - after a round of talks, there was time for questions. So I stood up and asked the panel whether they felt journalism's poor reputation was justified. All of them agreed that publishing the odd untruth just 'came with the territory' and was something you sometimes necessarily had to do.