a placeless world

Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity must be in one hell of a state.

On the one hand, it's open season. One of Right Radio's favorite "liberal media" targets, The New York Times, has admitted its coverage of the lead up to war in Iraq "was not as rigorous as it should have been."

On the other hand, The Times isn't exactly admitting the kind of blunders that Limbaugh, Hannity and their ilk seem to believe plague America's self-proclaimed paper of record. On the contrary, in its 1,100-word confession to the nation, The Times suggests it acted far too much like Right Radio and far to little like the most important newspaper in the world. In short, it didn't let the facts get in the way of a good yarn, especially when it came to tales of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Baathist ties to terrorism.

And while the Bush administration was using those very prevarications to make a case that would result in the deaths of tens of thousands, The Times was drafting article after article based on questionable claims, many coming from "a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on regime change" and eagerly supported by administration hawks.

What The Times didn't mention in its mega culpa was that those sources were most often quoted under the condition of anonymity.

Anonymous sourcing is a drug: a devilish deal reporters make to get a scoop — and sources often use to run roughshod over the truth. If there truly is a plague in national and international reporting, it's the all-too-frequent use of anonymous "official" sources. A search of the Google News database today reported 2,910 separate uses of the phrase "on the condition of anonymity"
within the last 30 days.

And from which website did Google locate the very first hit? Even as The Times admitted to mistakes made by editors and reporters "too intent on rushing scoops into the paper," it allowed the reporting team of Richard Stevenson and Eric Lichtblau to add the words of an anonymous administration official to its coverage John Ashcroft's warning that terrorists may have infiltrated the United States.

Good little journalists learn in good little journalism classes that quotes are used to advance a story. "Quotes," one textbook explains, "are like exclamation points."

But here was Stevenson and Lichtblau's anonymously attributed exclamation point: "There's no real new intelligence, and a lot of this has been out there already… There really is no significant change that would require us to change the alert level of the country."

Thirty-three words of nothingness coming from nowhere. If the standard that Times editors use to determine whether to allow anonymous sourcing permitted this quote, it is no wonder that the paper's editorial board is now finding it necessary to admit that plenty of mistruths made their way into all the news that's fit to print.

The Times won't end its addiction, though. Nor will it even address it. In the increasingly hostile war for readers, unilateral disarmament isn't a good strategy. As evidenced by Google's search results, even if The Times cut back on its use of anonymous sourcing, thousands of others would continue.

The good news is that The Times has pledged to "set the record straight." The bad news is that the paper's journalistic integrity is broken.

As such, news consumers will increasingly choose the likes of Limbaugh and Hannity to quench their thirst for information. For as long as they have reason to believe they're not getting the straight story, they'll choose the person who delivers the broken story the best.