Judge to NY Times: Out With The Sources
A judge has issued an
order to the New York Times to reveal anonymous sources by Wednesday,
October 25th. The major media haven't covered the story -- which is odd, because
it's one of their own flagships in the court's sights.
(UPDATE: Trade paper Editor & Publisher has covered the story in some depth, albeit with its usual one-sidedness, here).
The case is that of Dr Steven J Hatfill, whom the Times's columnist Nick Kristof (who came to the Times from that bastion of journalistic depth and excellence, Rolling Stone, didn't he?) accused in a series of columns of mass murder: specifically, of being the anthrax terrorist of 2001. Hatfill takes exception to that characterization and has sued Kristof (who wriggled out of the suit on a technicality) and the Times for libel.
Many cutting-edge journalists use anonymous sources with abandon -- the Washington Post, for example, seems to use them in preference over named sources -- and readers, who have lost more and more faith in the legacy media with each emerging scandal, often suspect that an anonymous source is nothing other than the imagination or prejudice of the scribe, given voice in a newsroom culture that will never call the writer to account for fabrication in service of a shared philosophy, political party, or "template."
At one time such a charge would have been preposterous, but as case after case after case after case after case after case after case of fabricated sources (and whole fabricated stories) emerges, it is clear that this is a common and widespread journalistic technique. (Each of those linked cases is different... and I skipped the low-hanging fruit of Peter Arnett [also here] and Dan Rather and the other lightweights of TV "journalism"). This may indeed be connected to the readers' loss of faith, which in turn is clearly connected to circulation declines and plummeting ad revenue.
In the Hatfill case, the Times's culture of impunity let Kristof make outrageous assertions unsupported by a single named source. Whether the maligned doctor can collect is a different question. The Times, and some of its sources', hostility to Hatfill apparently stems from his claimed service in the Rhodesian Special Air Service, which offers up a double irony: the claim was not, apparently, true; and for all that Kristof and his fellow-travelers malign the UDI period Rhodesian government, it's hard to look at Zimbabwe today and call the dictatorship of the vile Mugabe, whom the Times raised practically to sainthood in its pages, an improvement. Perhaps tens of thousands whom Mugabe killed and placed beyond suffering are the ones the Times sought to benefit. They're so concerned about the little people, you know.
Of course, love of dictators is nothing new at the Times, where a man in uniform brings them to their knees. In the height of the cold war, the Times published a fawning obituary for Stalin, making it clear that Trotsky was the bad guy, and offering this unintentionally revelatory quote: "[T]hose who survived the purges hailed Stalin as a supreme genius."
You don't say.
The Times is all but certain to fight against naming Kristof's sources (if any). They have gotten Kristof released from the suit, but the paper remains on trial (OK, to be legalistically pedantic about it, in the motions phase, soon to be on trial). The most likely next step for the Times is to offer extremely large settlements to Hatfill and his lawyers, hoping that the lawyers will pressure Hatfill, who is looking not for money, but for vindication, into taking the bait.
(UPDATE: Trade paper Editor & Publisher has covered the story in some depth, albeit with its usual one-sidedness, here).
The case is that of Dr Steven J Hatfill, whom the Times's columnist Nick Kristof (who came to the Times from that bastion of journalistic depth and excellence, Rolling Stone, didn't he?) accused in a series of columns of mass murder: specifically, of being the anthrax terrorist of 2001. Hatfill takes exception to that characterization and has sued Kristof (who wriggled out of the suit on a technicality) and the Times for libel.
Many cutting-edge journalists use anonymous sources with abandon -- the Washington Post, for example, seems to use them in preference over named sources -- and readers, who have lost more and more faith in the legacy media with each emerging scandal, often suspect that an anonymous source is nothing other than the imagination or prejudice of the scribe, given voice in a newsroom culture that will never call the writer to account for fabrication in service of a shared philosophy, political party, or "template."
At one time such a charge would have been preposterous, but as case after case after case after case after case after case after case of fabricated sources (and whole fabricated stories) emerges, it is clear that this is a common and widespread journalistic technique. (Each of those linked cases is different... and I skipped the low-hanging fruit of Peter Arnett [also here] and Dan Rather and the other lightweights of TV "journalism"). This may indeed be connected to the readers' loss of faith, which in turn is clearly connected to circulation declines and plummeting ad revenue.
In the Hatfill case, the Times's culture of impunity let Kristof make outrageous assertions unsupported by a single named source. Whether the maligned doctor can collect is a different question. The Times, and some of its sources', hostility to Hatfill apparently stems from his claimed service in the Rhodesian Special Air Service, which offers up a double irony: the claim was not, apparently, true; and for all that Kristof and his fellow-travelers malign the UDI period Rhodesian government, it's hard to look at Zimbabwe today and call the dictatorship of the vile Mugabe, whom the Times raised practically to sainthood in its pages, an improvement. Perhaps tens of thousands whom Mugabe killed and placed beyond suffering are the ones the Times sought to benefit. They're so concerned about the little people, you know.
Of course, love of dictators is nothing new at the Times, where a man in uniform brings them to their knees. In the height of the cold war, the Times published a fawning obituary for Stalin, making it clear that Trotsky was the bad guy, and offering this unintentionally revelatory quote: "[T]hose who survived the purges hailed Stalin as a supreme genius."
You don't say.
The Times is all but certain to fight against naming Kristof's sources (if any). They have gotten Kristof released from the suit, but the paper remains on trial (OK, to be legalistically pedantic about it, in the motions phase, soon to be on trial). The most likely next step for the Times is to offer extremely large settlements to Hatfill and his lawyers, hoping that the lawyers will pressure Hatfill, who is looking not for money, but for vindication, into taking the bait.
In a loosely related case, the Times has taken a
few rockets for its feeble ombudsman, Bernard Calame's, belated admission that,
yeah, maybe we were wrong to publish the money-tracking story, seeing as how it
was legal, after all, and effective, after all, and was never abused to monitor
anybody but real, bad, terrorists... after all. The 'sphere has beaten the
stuffing out of Calame for his admission that his reason for initially defending
the Times was that... he couldn't take the heat of the Bush Adminstration
"attacking" his paper, and it made him crazy. Patterico deals with the substance
of that claim here;
Calame's story is here;
the admission is at the end (more on that in a moment).
So the New York Times is in the interesting position of defending, at once, the proposition that Tony Snow calling it "irresponsible" for an act which dried up a significant anti-terror intelligence source is way out of line, but the Times itself should be allowed to call Steve Hatfill a serial killer on the basis of Kristof's attempt at the Joe McCarthy "secret evidence" gambit. I suppose it takes the sort of reasoning (or perhaps, morals) one develops in Ivy League schools to be capable of such logical acrobatics.
As I mentioned just a moment ago, Calame's belated rowback on the money-tracking story is tacked on at the end of a long and wandering piece, and he's taken some heat from bloggers for what they see as his attempt to bury the rowback under an unrelated story (a classic newspaper trick: phony allegation on page 1A with a headline in forty-point type, correction on 37D in agate to CYA against a suit). However, I don't believe the matter is as insignificant, or unrelated, as many others do.
The substance of Calame's main story is that the Times has agonized over the "magazines," weekly sections that are largely infomercial content. This is in perfect keeping with the substance of most of his recent writing, which is navel-gazing about the declining fortunes of the Times and its newsroom, and bemusement over the departure of readers. As Calame has a hard time taking his blinders off long enough to see how ill-advised the money-tracking hit piece was, he's not able to connect the decline in the paper's trustworthiness to its decline in circulation, to revenue, to reporters cleaning out their desks. But that doesn't mean you can't.
So the New York Times is in the interesting position of defending, at once, the proposition that Tony Snow calling it "irresponsible" for an act which dried up a significant anti-terror intelligence source is way out of line, but the Times itself should be allowed to call Steve Hatfill a serial killer on the basis of Kristof's attempt at the Joe McCarthy "secret evidence" gambit. I suppose it takes the sort of reasoning (or perhaps, morals) one develops in Ivy League schools to be capable of such logical acrobatics.
As I mentioned just a moment ago, Calame's belated rowback on the money-tracking story is tacked on at the end of a long and wandering piece, and he's taken some heat from bloggers for what they see as his attempt to bury the rowback under an unrelated story (a classic newspaper trick: phony allegation on page 1A with a headline in forty-point type, correction on 37D in agate to CYA against a suit). However, I don't believe the matter is as insignificant, or unrelated, as many others do.
The substance of Calame's main story is that the Times has agonized over the "magazines," weekly sections that are largely infomercial content. This is in perfect keeping with the substance of most of his recent writing, which is navel-gazing about the declining fortunes of the Times and its newsroom, and bemusement over the departure of readers. As Calame has a hard time taking his blinders off long enough to see how ill-advised the money-tracking hit piece was, he's not able to connect the decline in the paper's trustworthiness to its decline in circulation, to revenue, to reporters cleaning out their desks. But that doesn't mean you can't.
Posted: Monday - October 23, 2006 at 01:37 AM
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