alternative hippopotamus

progressive cyberdadaism from our nation’s capital

October 23, 2005

For Your Infotainment

by kim @ 4:41 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Out and about over the last few days, I met the proprietors of the dog blog. Try it! It could be habit forming.

Meanwhile, a little bit of idle chatter regarding the Plame/Rove/Miller black hole from which no Bushie will be left behind (hopefully).

The whole notion of unattributed sources rests on the idea that if you have two sources that confirm the facts of your story, then it’s very likely accurate. Among other things, this guards against, say, a powerful figure in the government using the reporter to print malicious gossip. If you’ve read All the President’s Men and/or Secret Man, you know that Woodstein goes to great length to double check anonymous leaks.

What if Mark Felt had recruited friends to verify his leaks? Surely, this thought must have crossed Woodstein’s mind at some point. They reasoned, however, that Felt’s revelations put him in such a vulnerable position, that he wouldn’t have risked something like that.

In the case of the White House Iraq Group Libby, Rove, and possibly Cheney planned to discredit Wilson. They came up with a line that went something like: Wilson’s trip to Niger was a boondoggle set up by his wife who’s a covert agent for the CIA.

This accomplished three things:

My point is that when this level of coordination exists the use of multiple sources is meaningless. Granted, Miller didn’t know this, though her mia culpa in the NYT suggests that the possibility had occurred to her. And unlike the hypothetical example of Felt coordinating sources, WHIG did not put themselves in a vulnerable position.

There are other reporters who now are aware that they were customers of a product manufactured by WHIG. Why do they feel themselves bound by promises of confidentiality?

If a reporter’s shield law ever came about (I’m not sure if that’s a good idea, by the way) how would it deal with a conspiracy perpetrated by the anonymous leakers?

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hip·po·pot·a·mus n. A notion, perhaps distinct from conventional wisdom, that needs to be verified by reality-based scrutiny.

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