Your Legacy Media

Funny because it’s true.

Oh, and it’s also from Reuters which is kind of the British CNBC/WSJ/Bloomberg.

Reading news in the age of Trump? Think like a spy.
By Peter Van Buren, Reuters
Thurday Jan 5, 2017

President-elect Donald Trump is clearly antagonistic toward the mainstream media. That attitude is unlikely to change after Inauguration Day. His disdain for journalists and reluctance to release details about his finances and business ventures may force journalists to rely increasingly on anonymous sources, a strategy that reputable news organizations have long frowned upon.

So in the age of Trump, how should a reader approach coverage that relies primarily on anonymous sources?

Read the news like a spy.

By not naming a source, a journalist asks you to trust them. Did they talk to an intern or a policymaker? Every source has an agenda; if we as readers don’t know the source we have a hard time parsing out and then evaluating that motivation. Remember the way the press covered decisions that led to the 2003 Iraq War via articles based on unnamed sources, all with tall tales of Weapons of Mass Destruction?
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So how can readers exercise intelligent skepticism?

One way is to apply some of the same tests intelligence officers use to help them evaluate their own sources. Since an article’s unnamed sources are fully unknown to you as the reader, not every test applies, but thinking backwards from the information in front of you to who could be the source is a good start on forming a sense of how credible what you are being told might be.

For example, is a source in a position to know what they say they know, what intelligence officers call spotting? A story claiming bureaucrats are unhappy with the new president might be legitimately sourced from a contact in the human resources office of a large cabinet agency. But how many people’s opinions would that source be in a position to know, beyond cafeteria gossip? Tens out of a workforce of tens of thousands? So if the finished story reads “State Department officials are unhappy with the incoming administration,” how credible is such a broad statement? Is it news what a handful of people think?

The “position to know” idea scales up sharply when a source says they are privy to important conversations: how would they know the contents of a call the president-elect made to a foreign leader? Only a very few people would be in the room for something like that. Would any be likely leakers?

Any article that cites a source who claims to know the “why” behind some action, what was in the head of a decision maker, should be subject to special skepticism. Key officials are generally not in the habit of explaining their true motivations outside a tight inner circle. In your own life, do you?

Legitimate sources risk something by talking, such as loss of a good job, maybe even jail. Is what they will get out of the leak worth the risk they are assuming? On the other hand, sources may push out fake leaks intended to influence public opinion. Often times these take the form of excerpts from classified documents. What would an anonymous source hope to achieve by such a leak, at the risk of prison? If you the reader can’t suss out the mystery source’s likely agenda – what they want – then you’re the guy at the poker table who can’t tell who the rube is, and needs a mirror to find out. Agenda-driven information can still be true, but is always worth a good sniff test by a discerning reader.
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Similarly, is what you are reading consistent with other information on the subject? Does the new info track known facts, what intelligence officers call expectability? Overall, the further away from expectability a story stretches, the more obligation to be skeptical. While anything can have a potential explanation, falling back on “it might be true” or “you can’t prove it’s not true” are typical enablers of bogus news, or misleading and inaccurate reporting.

I might add that motivation is not proof and apparent lack of it not exculpatory. Who foresaw Norbury and her jealousy (ok, Moffat and Gatiss didn’t play fair by elevating a peripheral character, even so it’s a lesson)?

The point is you can’t trust anyone, least of all me because I have an explicit agenda, traffic in only the most scurrilous lies, and have no compunction or morals at all.