Challenges Of Working with Sources....

Chapter 7 in our class  text book "Ethics and Journalism" is about working with sources.  There are several issues that are addressed in this chapter that a journalist should be cautious of- from selecting sources, to avoiding biases, to getting reliable sources  and to being wary of overdependence on sources. The movie, "The INFORMANT" (by Matt Damon)  opened my eyes to a scenario where a journalist or journalists could easily fall victim of a manipulative, dishonest , unreliable, over-ambitious, self-seeking source like the  main charactor in this movie, Mark Whitacre. I do not wish to discuss the entireity of the movie for the sake of those who might be planning to watch it, but I realize how an initially promising story- idea, from a voluntary source with insider access, could put an unsuspecting journalist and the media agency they work for  into a very dangerous situation , considering the way events in this movie unfold and end up. In this case, the FBI agents are the victims, but such a situation would happen to a journalist. Note that this movie is based on a non-fiction book, "The Informant" (by Kurt Eichenwald).
As for now, given such a  complicated situation, I would recommend that a journalist or the media agency faced with a similar case first gather as much information  as possible from various sources, but hold out on publishing the story until the investigation comes to a close.

*The New York Times has articles about the Archer Daniels Midland Company conspiracy with competitors to fix prices  investigation, archived from as far back as 1996 in this link:
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/22/business/4-archer-daniels-executives-to-leave-board-for-outsiders.html and the entire listing of stories about this investigation at http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/a/michael_d_andreas/index.html?offset=20&s=newest.) I intend to read through them to see how the New York Times and other media handeled this story at its different stages and whether or not journalistic ethics were complied with or compromised.