The Jordan Press Association Council has stressed the importance of media outlets, news organizations and digital platforms exercising the highest degree of professional responsibility when reporting information related to military and security figures, sites and institutions, while preserving the public’s right to know without publishing details that could, individually or when aggregated, pose a risk to national security or the safety of individuals and institutions.
اضافة اعلان
The Council noted that the publication of information available through open sources does not necessarily mean that republishing it in full detail is risk-free, particularly in today’s digital environment, where information can be collected, analyzed and linked in ways that may generate security implications beyond the news value of the published material.
The Council said that reporting the appointment of a military or security figure to a new position, or providing information about their general professional experience and career, falls within legitimate journalistic work when based on reliable sources and consistent with professional standards. However, unnecessarily expanding coverage to include details about movements, locations, the nature of duties, organizational structures or personal information—or reassembling such details into a comprehensive picture that could be exploited—requires newsrooms and content producers to exercise greater judgment and responsibility.
The Council called on media institutions, journalists and sector workers to adopt the standard of “journalistic need to publish” rather than relying solely on whether information can be obtained. This requires weighing the news value of information against the potential consequences of publishing it, with particular attention to information that could reveal locations, movements, operational patterns or sensitive security details.
The Council also stressed that a journalist’s responsibility does not end with publishing the original material, but also extends to how it is presented and reproduced across social media platforms, including headlines, photographs, infographics, videos and maps, as combining these elements could increase the security sensitivity of the content.
The Council reaffirmed that the fundamental principle is to respect press freedom and the public’s right to know while complying with applicable laws, the Press Code of Ethics and professional standards. It stressed the need to clearly distinguish between information that serves the public interest and information that provides no genuine news value and whose publication could cause unjustified harm.
The Council said the rapid development of information-analysis technologies and artificial intelligence, along with growing capabilities to collect information from open sources, requires media organizations to continuously develop their editorial standards and avoid automatically treating previously published information as safe simply because it is publicly available.
The Council called on all journalists to exercise the highest levels of accuracy, verification and professional judgment, and to treat publication as a public responsibility, based on the fundamental principle that not everything that can be published should necessarily be published, and that the journalistic value of information must always be assessed in light of the public interest and the potential consequences of its publication.
