There are a lot of documents about illegal activities, like about making/selling drugs for example. Most of them involve some kind of interview with people who are actively involved in those criminal activities. I can imagine that some of those interviews are fake but if they are not, then a journalist might get into having an important knowledge about identities/contacts/places etc. Don’t they then get questioned by a police? I know they would lose their credibility if they gave away this information but don’t they get under pressure to let go of this information to the authorities?
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> Don’t they then get questioned by a police?
Generally not, because the police understand that journalists don’t want to talk about their sources or they won’t get any more interviews. There also isn’t anything the police can legally do to get that information out of them if they don’t want to reveal it. Simply knowing that information isn’t a crime and if the police decided to somehow steal the information it would be illegally obtained and unusable in court.
Talking to criminals isn’t illegal. Filming illegal activities is not illegal. Knowing important details about criminals and crimes is not illegal. So if the police show up and ask about those things the journalists can just say “No, I’m not talking to you.”
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