No. If you burn your sources, you will never be trusted again and your credibility and effectiveness as a reporter will be destroyed.

If you want to be a serious journalist, you need to keep secrets.

The journalist promises the source to protect the source’s anonymity, because the source has strong reasons to want/need anonymity, such that they would not tell the journalist the information, otherwise.

The journalist isn’t barred from telling the true information – just from revealing the identity of the source.

So, if the journalist betrays the source by violating their promise and revealing their source, there are multiple consequences, such as:
* The source will not trust the journalist again.
* The source will likely become hostile to the journalist.
* The source may deny it, raising the suggestion that the journalist is lying about their report.
* No one who hears of this will trust that journalist again.
* Other who hear of this may also distrust most/all journalists in the future, and information sources in general may become less and less likely to speak out in any case where they don’t want to be identified.

So, that’s an awful lot of reasons not to do it, and is why there is a code of behavior for journalists about not revealing sources. By having such a code of behavior, the entire profession, and the reading public, all gain, in countless cases, in the long term. Violating it is therefore a big deal, and should be taken as such.

If you tell someone that what they are saying is off the record and then you put it onto the record, you just lied. You can no longer claim the truth.

Keeping source confidential is important for journalism to dig out the facts of stories. If you get information “off the record” you should not use it and, I believe, you could be facing a lawsuit if you did. If it is “off the record” you could use that information to maybe give you an idea of how to proceed on a story without using that person as a source. You could maybe convince that person that going on the record is a necessary thing. There are things that can be done with that information other than publishing it.

Speaking the truth is the definition of Information.
The journalistic goal is to Act in the publics interest and Maintain the publics Trust. That is top priority.
Profit should be beneath this. Unfortunately this has seemed to have changed an profit of supporting various propaganda measures have overtaken the gold standards for Journalism.

Sources of information must trust journalists to protect their identity, where applicable, and not to misrepresent them or their views.

A source is often only such because they believe their information is vital, but their identity is secret.
If they can’t trust the reporter, they won’t cooperate.