[otterley]

No journalistic institution is perfect. And, there are indeed journalists who cut corners, tell misleading narratives, or are too credulous.

However, there have been important and sometimes shocking stories that have been told thanks to reporting based on trustworthy, anonymous sources. The Pentagon Papers is a textbook example.

[michael1999]

You completely miss my complaint. Perhaps I was unclear. The Pentagon Papers is the exact opposite! Ellsberg actually shared the documents; there were literal "papers" involved in the Pentagon Papers. That's the "real evidence" I demand.

Off-the-record conversational, "I'd never lie to you" BS, from anonymous sources in the "intelligence community" is a lead to investigate, not a story. They weren't called the Pentagon Whispers.

[otterley]

Fair point!

[michael1999]

And remember how quickly Powell’s “Yellow Cake” fairytale fell apart once they resorted to sharing the docs. The docs were fake! Actual evidence can be interrogated and disproven. While anonymous, evidence-free reporting is unfalsifiable.

[smcin]

It wasn't ever "Powell’s “Yellow Cake” fairytale". It was Bush-Cheney's. And the scandal is not merely that it was fake, but was publicly known to be fake in spring 2003.

The "Iraq tried to buy yellowcake in Niger" claims [0] were a story pushed by the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) which was set up Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz intentionally to bypass the CIA's assessment and stovepipe unproven claims in order to cobble together a casus belli. Powell refused to have anything to do with it. Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson said it was BS. CNN reported it was BS. And on, and on.

And even at that, Bush still had to use Tony Blair's admin's name to try to inject the claim into discourse, the famous Sixteen Words in the 2003 SOTU "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Not Colin Powell. If you read between the lines of writings by Powell and others, he believed the neocons in the Bush-Cheney admin could not be deterred from taking the country to war on false premises; Powell was to that process like Robert Reich was to Clinton's NAFTA deal ("the train's going to leave the station whether you were on it or not").

Historians can decide whether Powell should have protested more strongly, e.g. resigning (as Tony Blair's Foreign Secretary Robin Cook did) and denouncing the thing, instead of playing along it at his UNGA address.

If Powell had not complied with Rumsfeld, he would have been trashed as completely as Major General Taguba for actually writing a full and truthful Abu Ghraib Report [1]).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taguba_Report

[michael1999]

So Powell volunteered to sell Cheney's lie to the UN, knowing it to be a lie, because he wanted to stay in power rather than tell the truth like Shinseki? If Powell knew it to be false, and presented it with his credibility, I see no reason to not call it Powell's lie as much as Cheney's.

That's even worse than I thought. But fits with Powell's history in Vietnam.