Do you believe “Deep Throat”, who went decades without being “named”, was an unreliable source?
No, but cling locking is.
Cling licking is ok. Or something like that.
He was talking about choosing between 2 people commenting on the same issue, one named and one unnamed. There is no “named” person in your example. There is also the qualifier “other things being equal”. If someone has a record, decades long, of giving good info, then “other things” are not likely to be equal.
Really? There were no named people denying that those events took place?
I don’t think we should underestimate Palin. I assume she is cramming for the next election cycle. She’ll know the names of several newspapers and magazines, the current leaders of all the countries, know that North Korea and South Korea are different countries, and at know at least one factoid to drop into any response she gives. The way that she shapes the debate and can come up with just the right turn of phrase to cater to her audience shows that she is no dummy. The expectations will be so low that even a mediocre performance in a debate/press conference will be seen as a win.
Woodward and Bernstein never reported info they got from Deep Throat directly. They used the info they got from him to further their investigation.
But if you’ve got an example of where a similar situation occurred, you can cite it and we can evaluate whether or not it’s a good analogy.
The other problem, of course, is that we now know who he was, and it’s hard to look at things objectively and pretend that we don’t know. As the Associate Director of the FBI, I would consider him to be a pretty credible source of what the FBI was doing.
As Snowboarder Bo says, there are no 2 people in the scenario; one named, the other not. But even if there were, if the one named, was, say, the guy who runs TMZ (too lazy to look it up right now), and the other was unnamed, but the person reporting the information from the unnamed source was themselves a more trustworthy source than the TMZ guy, who do you believe?
I believe the trustworthy reporter whose source would prefer not to be on record over the named guy who is really nothing more than a gossip-monger.
It’s not at all relevant that we now know who “Deep Throat” was. At the time that we didn’t know, we still were willing to believe what was attributed to him precisely because the ones reporting on his statements were, themselves, trustworthy.
[quote=“Shayna, post:648, topic:471457”]
This is entirely true. Back in the day there were journalistic standards that were understood and enforced. Deep Throat’s unsupported word was not enough for publication – they used his information to ask the right questions to the right people and get a second source to confirm the information. The editors were the ones we were trusting, whether we knew it or not, to push the reporters to always get a second source, even if both sources were anonymous.
I don’t have any idea whether standards like this are used routinely anymore. The major press like the Post and NYT claim it, but there have been plenty of instances when their editors have been duped by their reporters. And TV news… well, we’ve all seen how thay will report anything at all during a breaking news event.
This isn’t to say all this Palin stuff isn’t true, however. I tend to believe it, but that is at least in part because of what I’ve already heard and believed about her.
It wasn’t the same thing. Woodward and Bernstein did not report Deep Throat’s info directly. It wasn’t like they said “Nixon is on record as having said ‘x is true’, but we have an unnamed source telling us that x is actually false.” They used the info they got from DT to direct their investigation. To decide whom to talk to and what questions to ask them; that sort of thing.
The “Deep Throat” nickname wasn’t just a nod to the X-rated film, but a reference to him being a Deep Background source-- one that you don’t cite directly, as a matter of journalistic ethics.
Of course, if you have an example of this from their reporting, let’s see it. Then we can judge whether it really fits the criteria of other things being equal.
This is not correct. But, the Post didn’t print what he said without getting confirmation from other sources.
Yes, it is correct. DT was deep background. They could report what other anonymous sources said, if those sources agreed with him, but not what DT said. The “unnamed” source would always have been someone other than DT.
But again, if you have an example of this, let’s see it. I’m willing to stand corrected if I’m wrong, but that’s my understanding. And please, don’t quote from the movie. 
I will look, but it seems an impossibility – when there are two anonymous sources saying the same thing, and the published information is attributed to an anonymous source, how is it possible to conclude that the source referred to was never Mark Felt?
Probably true, but don’t you consider the fact that Woodward himself tells us DT was considered a deep background source to be relevant?
At any rate, there is no way we can determine if “other things” are equal unless we see an actual quote, in context. Talking about how one might have viewed something that happened decades ago surrounding a story the outcome of which we all know very well is an odd way to draw an analogy with Sarah Palin and her clothes. I think of Woodward and Bernstein as reporters of the highest integrity, although I don’t know what their reputation was, at the time. The reporter in question here is someone I’ve never heard of. I also wouldn’t know how to compare the journalistic integrity of Vanity Fair today with that of The WaPo in the early 1970s.
I would note that, ironically, it was in Vanity Fair that DT revealed his identity several years ago.
I was being a snarky asshole in my last post. John Mace has it completely correct; I blame a slight memory lapse and an early morning need to be a jerk for my error.
And I say this as a Watergate buff. I own well over 20 books on the subject.
John is right; the parallels aren’t there to justify using this as an adequate comparison.
You would have known this if you’d clocked the ling in the first place; everyone knows that you should always do that first.
Hey, pal, I grew up clocking the ling in Plantation, FL back in the late '70s. I know all about clocking the ling, believe me. We invented that shit, back about the same time we realized that things were lots less hairy than than they were wicked.
:rolleyes:;)
Like Deep Throat said" follow the money’.
It will lead you to Sarah Palin. That is what she is interested in.
Can you imagine how much money she could make running for president? She could give speeches to adoring rich fans forever.
So, wait, we could pool our resources and say, “OK, Sarah, for $2.5 mil, we want you to slip this paragraph demanding UHC into your republican convention speech!”?
Where do I send a check?
She could get elected president and then quit because critics would be mean to her. Hard to imagine that, but it could happen. Then she could spend the rest of her life telling America how she was driven out of office. Righties would buy it. They bought it in Alaska.