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FirmhandKY -> RE: Report: Bush Mulled Sending Troops Into Buffalo (7/27/2009 8:47:45 AM)
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oh, hell ... the NYT itself admits it has a problem with anonymous sources:
Those Persistent Anonymous Sources
quote:
By CLARK HOYT
Published: March 21, 2009
THE Times has a tough policy on anonymous sources, but continues to fall down in living up to it. That’s my conclusion after scanning a sampling of articles published in all sections of the paper since the first of the year. This will not surprise the many readers who complain to me that the paper lets too many of its sources hide from public view.
How about a NYT admission that the entire "John McCain had an affair" was a BS story, based on "unsubstantiated sources":
quote:
Anonymous sources have provided some of the most important information in The Times, like the disclosure of the Bush administration’s extralegal bugging of international communications. But they have embarrassed the newspaper too, as with unsubstantiated suggestions that John McCain had an extramarital affair with a lobbyist.
The industry has been aware of the problem for a long time. For "Editor and Publisher":
The 'Times' Addiction to Anonymous Sources
Published: May 22, 2003
This unsigned editorial appeared in the May 19 issue of E&P.
quote:
The real lesson from the Blair affair is that the Times' system for dealing with accuracy in its newspaper and discipline in its newsroom is badly broken -- if, indeed, any system exists. It's all very well to "trust" reporters, as Times executives insistently declared, but the dull credulity top editors evinced throughout this episode suggests they have not learned the first thing the old hardscrabble City News Bureau in Chicago told its greenest recruits: If your mother says she loves you, check it out.
How is it, for instance, that The New York Times could be gulled into publishing on its front page a story accusing a teenager of being the triggerman in the Washington-area sniper attacks -- without any editor apparently ever asking the tyro reporter to identify these unnamed "law-enforcement officials" he is quoting?
One inescapable conclusion from this scandal is that the Times has developed an addictive tolerance for anonymous sources, the crack cocaine of journalism. The Times could not go cold turkey even in its extraordinary Mother's Day cataloging of Blair's journalistic sins, an occasion that cried out for 100% on-the-record reporting. For no apparent reason other than habit, an entirely innocuous e-mail message was attributed to "one fellow reporter."
Until someone comes forward and allows their name - and credibility and reasons - to be vetted, until someone produces the official document and agenda where it was proposed, you and the rest have zip, zero, nada real facts and information, and are working on your biases and an ideological basis.
Hell, even if it occurred, how the hell do you know that part of the proposal wasn't to request that the local (state?) authorities to request military support?
That would make it totally legal under the terms of Posse Comitatus, now wouldn't it?
But .. I don't know, and neither does anyone else in this thread. Until we have facts, we are guessing, assuming, and bullshitting.
Talk about it all you want, but recognize it's intellectual masturbation to date.
Firm
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