When a false press release reaches readers through a newsroom, who is answerable

Journalists routinely build stories on press releases, newsletters and briefings. If that material is untrue, or deliberately false, and readers are harmed by believing it, who should answer for the harm — the PR practitioner who issued it, the journalist who leaned too heavily on the source, or the public?

Legal philosophy conducted as a thought experiment: a hypothetical case is set up and then varied step by step. A company makes a false claim directly to a buyer; then it buys a newspaper advertisement instead; then it merely sends a press release that an editorial team turns into a news story. At each step the argument asks where responsibility moves, analysed through a means-and-ends framework and the question of intervening free will. No real data is gathered.

• The first two steps are straightforward. Whether the company deceives the buyer directly or through paid advertising, the company answers: it controlled the message and it took the money. Passing through a medium changes nothing.
• The third step differs, because an actor with free will stands in between. The newsroom is not paid and chooses for itself whether to publish, and that choice “breaks” the chain of causation running from company to victim.
• Yet the company has still used the medium as a means toward a forbidden end. The article compares this to a postman delivering an envelope whose fraudulent contents he does not know: the postman is only a means, has no intent, and is not answerable.
• And here is the core of the argument — a newsroom is not that postman. Knowing the content and choosing what to publish is precisely its job, so it cannot be excluded from responsibility altogether, even though it is not the party that took the money.
• The conclusion is that there is no off-the-shelf answer. The authors state plainly that the question cannot be settled “from the armchair”. It goes case by case, and a deceptive message is not by itself a crime: there must be an identifiable victim seeking restitution, and an adjudicator weighing both abstract principle and the expectations that practice has established in that time and place.

For newsrooms and PR practitioners the usable point is that choosing what to publish is an act with weight of its own, not mere relaying. The postman-versus-editor distinction is one of the most compact reasons on record for why fact-checking is not an optional extra. For teaching media ethics, the structure works directly as an exercise, because it walks a single case through variations and shows exactly where responsibility shifts and why.