How to Read a News Story About an Investigation
Eight Tips on Who Is Saying What By Benjamin Wittes
Over the past few months, I’ve been consistently surprised at the assumptions people make about who is leaking—or lawfully and properly disclosing—material to newspapers that have been breaking stories on L’Affaire Russe. Anonymous sourcing has many benefits, but one of its pernicious features is that it allows everyone to draw their own conclusions about who makes disclosures. These conclusions of course map onto preexisting political fault lines.
To a large degree, the problem is inherent. The nature of anonymity is that it obscures accountability. That’s its very purpose.
Yet journalists—at least ethical ones—do follow rules and conventions about sourcing. Those rules are self-serving, to be sure, ones that attempt to make trade-offs between the need to tell the truth and the need to obscure the identity of who’s helping a reporter reveal what he’s got. The basic balance ends up being that the words have to be literally true but that they can—at least to a certain degree—also be quite misleading to those who are not in on the code. Still, the rules are real and they constitute a known professional discipline that provides the savvy reader—those that take the time to learn them—a certain latitude to discern what’s going on. But that’s a big if. To make reasonable inferences, you have to both know the rules and use them to parse sourcing descriptions carefully.
I worked as a journalist for more than a decade. Those years included covering the period of intensive reporting concerning the last major investigation of a sitting president—and the alleged leaks that arose from that investigation.
https://lawfareblog.com/how-read-news-story-about-investigation-eight-tips-who-saying-what
= new reply since forum marked as read
We can't all go to journalism school, but this guy gives us the gist of it. (OK I think that's how to spell gist and I'm too lazy to look it up.)
What I gained from Mr. Wittes' article is the explanation of how investigative reporters go about their daily business. What they can say and what they can't, but still keep their jobs. I believe that most reporters at most reputable publishers are doing a very hard job, and doing it well. They follow the rules and they assume we know what those are.
You know, Rachel Maddow does the same thing, right? We need to how to read between the lines and understand that what they're not saying is as important as what they do say.
