Abstract In the modern media practice, the issue of journalistic privacy has gained a crucial topic, especially with the accelerated technological advances, the growth of digital media sources, and the growing popularity of various surveillance technologies. These changes have had a major impact on the professional life of journalists as communicators, posing complicated legal issues of the privacy of journalism and how it correlates with the media freedoms. This paper discusses the privacy of journalism under the communicator as a Palestinian law with special priorities on the tension of protecting privacy and guaranteeing freedom of expression and press. It seeks to determine how far the constitutional and criminal laws on Palestine would go in ensuring the privacy of journalism and also regulate media practices. It also discusses how criminal processes, cybercrime laws and new technologies influence the professional freedom of the journalists and the confidentiality of the journalism comprising of sources, communications and digital content. The study utilizes an inductive-analytical approach, and the analysis of the pertinent legal documents and the judicial practice helps to identify where the journalistic privacy can be impacted, to consider the security or order-related considerations. The results show that there are significant loopholes in the legal safeguarding of journalism privacy whereby surveillance, communications interception, and the lack of explicit safeguarding of journalism sources on the digital platform are concerned. It is concluded that the existing legislation needs to be further advanced to promote the privacy of journalism and at the same time take a moderate stand to protect the media rights and address the valid interests of the society. In line with this, the research findings suggest that legislative and judicial protection should be reinforced to guarantee the successful protection of journalistic privacy in Palestine, according to international standards.
ANJASS et al. (Fri,) studied this question.