[SpicyLemonZest]

Properly used unnamed sources are a crucial part of good journalism, but much of the problem we've seen recently is that media outlets aren't using them properly. I'd point to the Miles Taylor essay as a good concrete example of what goes wrong:

* They granted him journalistic anonymity for an opinion piece, which is very much not a common practice.

* The NYT published no corroboration of Taylor's claims, and their descriptions of how the editorial got published suggest they didn't even attempt to find corroboration.

* Their description of him as a "senior administration official" substantively misled people - the phrase is generally understood, and was understood at the time, to refer to people like agency heads or cabinet secretaries with direct accountability to the President.

And this is from an uncommonly responsible outlet! Many others will happily publish detailed claims of fact attributed only to "one person with knowledge of the matter".

[slg]

The Miles Taylor column was not a journalist citing an "unnamed source". It was a publisher allowing an anonymous opinion column. Those are different things. It is also important to realize the fundamental differences between reporting and opinion pieces including the expectations on fact checking.

Once again, another reason people should learn more about journalism in school.

[ahepp]

This seems like an incredibly bad faith argument to me.

Do you feel that the "Anonymous" op-ed was published in a manner that encouraged any sort of critical consumption?

[slg]

My point is the '"Anonymous" op-ed' was in fact an op-ed which comes with a different set of publishing standards than reporting. Most people either are ignorant of or refuse the recognize the differences between the two from a journalistic point of view. Fundamentally a bad op-ed in the NYT shouldn't have anyone questioning the quality of reporting that the NYT puts out.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I don't know. I understand the journalistic theory behind it, but as applied here, it feels like the equivalent of an investment bank explaining that it's unfair to hold it accountable for its false Libor submissions. The NYT's institutional reputation was a fundamental part of what made this op-ed work - nobody would have believed it if it were on a random anonymous Blogspot - and that reputation can't be cleanly divided according to the company's internal firewalls.

There's a point where you have to hold organizations accountable under normal standards, rather than letting them set up special rules to define their bad conduct out of existence.

[slg]

You still aren't delaminating the differences between opinion and reporting. This would have been an egregious column to post as part of NYT's news coverage. It isn't among the worst columns the NYT has published as part of its opinion columns. There are different standards for the two and different reputations for each department inside the company.

Basically what you are doing is blaming Alphabet because it doesn't hold YouTube and Google Search to the same standards and Trump was banned from one and not the other. Those products serve separate purposes and therefore need to have their own independent expectations and practices.

[ahepp]

Wow. I'm a huge consumer of news media and I never saw that this source was revealed. I'm only now learning the identity of the author, but you're absolutely correct that the portrayal was incredibly misleading and I'm infuriated at the attempted deceit.