[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.