There is absolutely a moral dimension to a person having prior knowledge of an attack not making an attempt to prevent it by alerting authorities, but there is still some sticky aspects to this. If a reporter is embedded with a US marine unit, do they have an obligation to warn the Pashtun villagers if it’s probable that people will be killed? If those two incidents aren’t seen as equivalent, then we risk falling into the morality hole where objective journalism still should be playing good guys and bad guys.
But we don’t even need to go that far. We’re talking about whether a payment to a terrorist organization to secure an interview should itself be considered as supporting terrorism in the sense intended by US and international law. I’m saying there’s a big difference between a NYT reporter paying expenses to get an interview with senior IRA officials and a person in Boston sending $1000 to the IRA to fund their operations. And my concern is that freedom of speech will be affected if we conflate the two.