Another Problem with Off-the-Record Status
Salon’s Glenn Greenwald offers another useful critique of the Politico reporter Mike Allen’s abuse of anonymous sourcing. Those of you who have seen Season 5 of The Wire are familiar with another serious problem with off-the-record status that often goes ignored: The journalist could be just inventing the quotation out of whole cloth. While it shouldn’t be difficult to find a former Bush administration official to bash Obama, it is even easier to just invent a colorful Obama-bashing quotation and print it as an anonymous statement. It may also be presumed that Politico‘s journalists are familiar with the quotation characteristics that would be conducive to being linked at the Druge Report, and an invented statement can better comply with those characteristics. After the fact, of course, Allen can dodge any questions about the validity of the statement by relying on journalistic principles of source anonymity.