In 2016, there were reports that a journalist working for De Limburger had been sentenced to twenty hours of community service after secretly recording a closed-door meeting in the Kerkrade town hall. Comments made in a confidential meeting (plans to save Roda JC football club) were thus made public. The newspaper had since fired the journalist for this ‘cardinal sin’.
Things that are not intended for the eyes and ears of a wider audience are always of interest. For example, if you tell your child to ‘just play outside for a bit’ while you’re in a meeting with their teacher, you can guarantee that they’re lurking in the hallway, hoping to catch something.
It must be important if the doors are closed, right? That thought crosses our minds whenever we reach the ‘confidential portion’ of meetings of the University Council or Faculty Councils. It’s actually usually not that interesting, they’ll want to discuss a professorial appointment or similar. They want to name names and they’d rather not have outsiders looking over their shoulder.
The integration plans for the hospital and the university were different though. We would have loved to know more about that (as would many on the work floor). The number of times we sighed, ‘Oh, to be a fly on that wall’. Or joked, ‘Go and press your ear to the door of the meeting room’. Don’t worry, we never did that. Leaving a recording device in the room? Never even crossed our minds.
We were so disappointed when we were told that the council members at the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life sciences would be voting on the plans behind closed doors. Initially, the chair of the FHML Council said that “every council member must feel comfortable speaking up”, but that doesn’t make sense to us. It is a democratically elected body, like the municipal council, or Parliament. Imagine if voters weren’t allowed to follow those debates.
In Groningen, the editor-in-chief of ‘sister paper’ UKrant also had a spot of bother over confidentiality. The Executive Board had sent round a confidential email (to a limited group of supervisors) about a significant recruitment freeze. UKrant published an article about it. The editors are now being reproached for also being employees and thus bound by the Integrity Code of Conduct (obliged to keep confidential anything they learn in the course of their jobs). But, well, nobody at UKrant was actually sent the email directly by the Board; they were just tipped off.
Should readers not expect such journalistic revelations from us, subjects that should be challenged? Journalism, particularly investigative journalism, relies at least partly on confidential information – so long as it isn’t stolen (or as in Kerkrade, secretly recorded). Observant frequently hears things, by mail, by letter, ‘live’. We then check it out and follow up with questions. It’s always a toss-up whether anything comes of it: sometimes it’s just a rumour, sometimes it’s worth publishing. And that should be allowed.
The editor-in-chief gives a look behind the scenes at the editorial office