Asymmetrical Information

Deliberate campaigns to mislead the media as to your future intentions - to say nothing of leaks of trial balloons - are so standard it's absurd, not just in politics but in business and sports as well. Would Kevin suggest the same treatment for basketball GMs who plant disinformation about who they're taking in the NBA Draft? C'mon.

Anonymous sources 1, reporters 0. Good luck with that national shield law, guys!

Jane, in starting a thread about this item, aren't you doing more than just yawning? Certainly you are no rabid Democratic partisan.

Don't hold your breath Kevin. I'm still waiting for someone to expose the source of the forged Rather-gate documents. I don't think we'll ever know who it was that committed the federal crime of forging military records to try to bring down a sitting president, yet the only thing Kevin is worried about is who was the source of a rumor.

Jane, you misunderstand. I'm not outraged by this, and I'm aware that misdirection is common. This complaint isn't partisan on my part, either. From the Bush point of view, this is a perfectly legitimate operation.

However, this was obviously a pretty well organized plan, not mere spin. At some point, reporters have to start outing sources who deliberately lie to them. If they don't, sources have no disincentive to lie.

(BTW, for the record, I've never worked in journalism unless you count a one-semester internship during my last year in college.)

Chief: You must be kidding, right? I've spent endless posts on both the National Guard affair in general and Rathergate in particular. The reason we don't know who forged the documents is because there's only one person in the world who does know, and he isn't talking. There's not really much more anyone can do about this unless they can get Bill Burkett to talk.

I might add that we also still don't know who forged the Niger uranium documents, a question of perhaps slightly greater importance than Bill Burkett's fevered imagingings.

"even to me it's obvious that a "confidential but persuasive source" systematically called a bunch of reporters and deliberately misled them .... In fact, the calls were so systematic and deliberate that it was obviously part of a White House plan."

Not "suspicious" or "suggestive" or "seems likely." It's obvious. As in, we should just assume it as fact, right?

Not to argue that it's necessarily the wrong interpretation. It wouldn't surprise me in the least. I just get a bit tired of how quick people are to reject any possibility of an innocent explanation.

The more I read about how 'journalism' is practiced (mistakes, spin, quote-fishing, fabrications attributed to interviewees), the more I wonder why *anyone* would attempt to give an honest answer to a 'journalist'.

Twist their (forked) tails til they scream.

The leaker lied, 'journalists' cried.

In a word, *heh*.

At some point, reporters have to start outing sources who deliberately lie to them. If they don't, sources have no disincentive to lie.

That's not even remotely true. There is an obvious disincentive, which is that that particular reporter isn't going to trust that particular source anymore. If you're correct, and a common source lied to a whole bunch of reporters, that common source is going to have a heck of a time the next time he has some information (or disinformation) he wants to leak.

You're also ignoring the effect "outing" would have on reporters. Any reporter who outs a source, for any reason at all, will have that much harder of a time finding sources in the future. So unless *all* the reporters out the leaker, the main effect won't be to discourage leakers -- it will be to drive leakers to the reporters who kept their mouths shut.

Now you might say "well, the honest leakers will still go to the reporters who talked" but you'd be wrong. An anonymous leaker cares about anonymity first, and getting the information out second -- otherwise he'd openly speak to the media. A person who cares first and foremost about anonymity will go to the reporters who have demonstrated a willingness to keep their mouths shut at all times.

And who knows, maybe the first wave of MSM journalists who first reported the Edith rumor(s) weren't actually called by anyone; for all we know, they may have read and republished the rumors they'd read on Drudge or blogs like Redstate, which I'm pretty sure were the first to publish these rumors.

Kevin Drum wants reporters to start burning anonymous sources who lie to them but he is unwilling to do so himself. See account of CBS anonymous source lying to Drum during Rathergate.

Btw Drum's statement above that there is only one person who knows who forged the documents is, perhaps unintentionally, revealing. So "talk" really means "confess" right?

Trying to fix above link .

James, the link is actually:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_09/004731.php

The first "p" should have actually been the second "t" in the address. Here's the money quote:

Last Thursday someone called me for the sole purpose of assuring me that CBS's source for the Killian memos was absolutely rock solid and had been vetted nine ways to Sunday. I should, I was told, feel comfortable blogging my heart out about the content of the memos without worrying about their authenticity.

As it happens, I declined to take that advice, but that's not what matters. What does matter is that my caller clearly knew that CBS's vetting was a judgment call, not a slam dunk, but was spinning very hard to convince me otherwise.

Kevin, when can we expect you to out the anonymous source then who apparently lied to you about the Killian memos?

Thanks Mr. Drum,

You've done an excellent job of convincing me that journalists' special pleading for the sanctity of their sources is essentially self-serving, masterbatory, bunk. You've demonstrated that the journalistic attitude is that this all-important principle is perfectly sacrificable as a means to preserve your own authority.

I'd suspected as much.

To get this back to a more sane track I think there is a difference between "Hey, this person over here is going to get the Supreme Court Nomination. Whoopse! I'm wrong" and a lie.

I think leaking Clement's name to the press was a fairly over the top effort by the White House to...I don't know what. Get the press off of Rove's back? Prevent progressive organizations from getting their talking points together (two days later and there still aren't many talking points out there)? Who the heck knows. Did the leaker even know s/he was wrong? Who knows.

I tend to agree with Jane on this one...*Yawn*

Well if this was deliberate misdirection I think it was rather unfair to Edith Clement to say the least. And I think it is reasonable to point this out.

Kate,

I apologize if my invective became a little excessive. But I think I have a valid point here. The entire set of complaints with regard to journalistic sources rests on the moral premise that the sources should be protected from retaliation. While I have some pretty significant qualms with that notion, I think its absolutely wrong that those claiming priviledges under that moral doctrine feel they have the right to violate that doctine in what is pretty clearly retaliative behav ior.

There is an obvious disincentive, which is that that particular reporter isn't going to trust that particular source anymore. If you're correct, and a common source lied to a whole bunch of reporters, that common source is going to have a heck of a time the next time he has some information (or disinformation) he wants to leak.

This is pretty clearly false. Look at the eagerness with which the NYT, Wash. Post, et al., have run with some of the recent leaks in the Plame thing that pretty clearly are coming from people involved in the investigation (e.g., Rove's lawyer or people close to him) and are being put out for strategic purposes. Like a lot of leaks, these are coming from people who want to spin the public on what's going on but don't want it attributed to them because identifying where it's coming from would reduce or eliminate its propaganda value. The media dutifully prints it, not because they think it's reliable but because they think it's "news." They do this even though some of these people have pretty clearly burned them in the past. Kevin's main point, I think, is that they need to stop letting themselves be used that way, and embarrassing the people who took them for a ride on the nomination is a good place to start.

An anonymous leaker cares about anonymity first, and getting the information out second -- otherwise he'd openly speak to the media. A person who cares first and foremost about anonymity will go to the reporters who have demonstrated a willingness to keep their mouths shut at all times.

Again, you seem to be working from a pretty quaint understanding of anonymous sourcing. We're not talking about Deep Throat here. We're probably talking about a coordinated plan to throw reporters off track by leaking them juicy tidbits that would keep them busy until Bush was ready to make his announcement. That's not particularly evil or horrible--not particularly admirable, either--but the eagerness with which the press ran with it is symptomatic of a real problem: the press tends to run with stuff based on whether it's juicy or not rather than whether it's true or not. Here, the WH maybe got a little carried away with exploiting that tendency, and if the press' embarrassment can be used to try to get both them and their sources to behave a little better next time, that would be a good thing.

I don't think this is particularly partisan stuff. It's not that the Bush White House is especially mendacious (well, maybe it is, but that's not the issue here), but that the press is way too willing to print unattributed spin.

DaveL,

Fair point if that what he were saying. But what I'm seeing is a pretty direct call for retaliation. That said, I'm not sure I agree with you with the primary motivations of most leakers. By and large, it appears to most often be a behavior aimed by those losing internal debates to have the public act as an additional voice for their point of view. If a journalist doesn't want to be a party to this manipulation, they have every opportunity to not participate or seek out the larger story. If Drum had urged this, I'd say fine. Unfortunately, it seems from what I see that he urges that journalists reveal the sources' identities (not acknowledging the implications for the source)

Look at the eagerness with which the NYT, Wash. Post, et al., have run with some of the recent leaks in the Plame thing that pretty clearly are coming from people involved in the investigation (e.g., Rove's lawyer or people close to him) and are being put out for strategic purposes

That's not a valid example. Obviously any reporter is going to know that Rove's lawyer is going to say things that make Rove look good.

A case could be made that the mainstream media has displayed a lack of standards in reporting Plame-related rumors, but then again if the media had standards Wilson would never have been able to fib his way to 15 minutes of fame in the first place, and nobody would ever have mentioned his wife. :)

Kevin's main point, I think, is that they need to stop letting themselves be used that way, and embarrassing the people who took them for a ride on the nomination is a good place to start.

As others have mentioned, outing the source of the forged Rathergate memos would be an even better place to start. That's an example of media incompetence that actually mattered.

Question: does anyone else find it odd that some are devoting more time and effort to discussing the speculation that preceded an event rather than the event itself?

Perhaps the problem is that some think that media speculation about a Supreme Court nominee is more important than the actual Supreme Court nominee.

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