Journalists are truth seekers

I have a good friend who is a fellow journalist and he is facing a dilemma right now with one of his stories.  He found out some information, (quite by accident) that could potentially have bad ramifications in the future (and possibly already has).  As a journalist it is our job to seek out the truth of an issue and report the facts.  The dilemma with this is that a person invloved in this situation is someone that my friend and I, (and the rest of our colleagues as well), hold very dear.  A great person, who is overworked but is always willing to take time out of his busy schedule to lend a helping hand.  My friend just kind of jumped in with the information he had without much digging and now this person that we all love could potantially get in trouble.

So the dilemma:  does my friend report the facts, and risk injuring his relationship (and the rest of us too actually) with this person even more?  Or does he report some of the facts and leave out key pieces of the story to try to save the friendship?

I told him that he needs to report the facts!  As much as it hurts to cause trouble for a friend...that cat is already out of the bag.  You can't just sugarcoat it because you're friends with someone.  We are truth seekers...we are the people entrusted to hold people in positions of power accountable for their actions and to let the public know of any wrong doings (whether intentional or unintentional, which in this case it wasn't done to intentionally cause harm to anyone).

He is still writing the piece and he said he would email it to me so I can give him some feed back.  So we'll see which way he goes with it.  I told him that he needs to be straight forward and tell the truth.  His digging into this issue has opened people's eyes and a problem is being fixed.  And that is the important thing to take away from this experience.  He told me yesterday that he as lost sleep over this whole thing and that he was considering leaving the field of journalism.  I told him that it wasn't always going to be like that and that he needs to stick with it.  He is a great writer and he has the instincts to be good at uncovering stories and it would be a shame if we lost his talent over this.