Over on Twitter, Glenn Greenwald recommended this USA Today profile of Boston University historian Andrew Bacevich, who has been one of the most prolific and incisive critics of U.S. foreign policy in recent years.

Greenwald called it "surprisingly good," which is right. But one thing about the piece really bothered me--how it dealt with the death of Bacevich's son in Iraq. Reporter Rick Hampson tells that story via the classroom:

The students knew that Bacevich had always opposed the war in Iraq. They may have known that his only son, Lt. Andrew J. Bacevich, Jr., was an Army officer there. They did not know that the day before he had been killed there.

That awful irony--a son follows his father into the military and dies in a war the father fought to end--has helped make Bacevich one of the most prominent and credible critics of U.S. foreign policy.

I doubt that USA Today really means to say that the death of Bacevich's son "helped" make Bacevich's critique more "credible," but that's certainly what comes across here. As a politically conservative critic of Clinton, Bush and now Obama policies, one would hope that his record speaks for itself.

Bacevich doesn't speak publicly much about his son's death--I recall that from an interview he did with Bill Moyers in 2008. And Bacevich says much the same later on in the USA Today article:

Bacevich says his son's loss does not affect his analysis and should not affect how it is received. "I've never said, 'You need to listen to me because my son died in Iraq.'"

Again, this is one troubling aspect to an otherwise interesting piece about an important voice in our national debate. But that passage was a little off.

Back in March, we wondered when U.S. corporate news outlets would find U.S./NATO killing of Afghan kids newsworthy. Back then, it was nine children killed in a March 1 airstrike. This resulted in two network news stories on the evening or morning newscasts, and two brief references on the PBS NewsHour.

On November 25, the New York Times reported--on page 12--that six children were killed in one attack in southern Afghanistan on November 23. This news was, as best I can tell, not reported on ABC, CBS, NBC or the PBS NewsHour.

There were, on the other hand, several pieces about U.S. soldiers eating Thanksgiving dinners.

Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald was one of the few commentators to write about the latest killings. As he observed:

We're trained simply to accept these incidents as though they carry no meaning: We're just supposed to chalk them up to regrettable accidents (oops), agree that they don’t compel a cessation to the war, and then get back to the glorious fighting. Every time that happens, this just becomes more normalized, less worthy of notice. It's just like background noise: Two families of children wiped out by an American missile (yawn: at least we don't target them on purpose like those evil Terrorists: we just keep killing them year after year after year without meaning to). It's acceptable to make arguments that American wars should end because they're costing too much money or American lives or otherwise harming American strategic interests, but piles of corpses of innocent children are something only the shrill, shallow and unSerious--pacifists!--point to as though they have any meaning in terms of what should be done.

The New York Times reports that Chelsea Clinton will be a full time special correspondent for NBC News, starting more or less immediately. Salon's Glenn Greenwald connected this news to the media careers of Meghan McCain (MSNBC), Luke Russert (NBC) and Jenna Bush Hager (NBC), and reached this conclusion about the state of our meritocracy:

We all owe our gratitude to NBC News for single-handedly correcting the shameful, long-standing exclusion from our media discourse of the views of young, journalistically accomplished heirs and heiresses to political power and great fortune; it is long overdue that former NYT executive editor Bill Keller, son of the CEO and chairman of Chevron, be joined by the next generation.

The only other thing to add is that the Times' account included this anonymous source, who offered the kind of remarkable insight one expects from someone who is granted anonymity to speak the truth:

One person close to Ms. Clinton said she had been quietly raising her profile for some time, though the public had not been completely aware of it. That person, who asked not to be identified because of a reluctance to speak for her, said Ms. Clinton had been more active in causes backed by her family’s William J. Clinton Foundation.

Without further evidence, the alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States is rather hard to believe. See Glenn Greenwald's take, for example, to appreciate the need for skepticism about U.S. claims--and the eagerness of many elite pundits to take the government story more or less at face value.

Jim Lobe's piece on how Iran experts are reacting is worth reading too.  Juan Cole's post has a provocative, almost unbelievable  headline--"Is an Iranian Drug Cartel Behind the Assassination Plot Against the Saudi Ambassador?"--but then again, the Official Story is pretty out there, too.

One can never underestimate the ways elite media can be spun by official sources, as this anonymous quote in the Washington Post today (10/12/11) demonstrates:

"There's a question of how high up did it go," said an administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House thinking. "The Iranian government has a responsibility to explain that."

Under normal circumstances, a government accusing another government of a criminal terrorism plot would have to demonstrate that it has the evidence--not the other way around. I guess I'd want to remain anonymous, too, if I was going to say something like that to a newspaper.

As progressive criticism of the Obama administration has intensified,  the critics of the critics have stepped forward to defend the White House. Much of the case comes down to saying that Obama's lefty critics don't know how the game is played in Washington.

Jonathan Chait from the New Republic had a New York Times Magazine piece this weekend (9/4/11) taking issue with Obama critics like Glenn Greenwald, accusing them of "magical thinking" about the power of the presidency. As the argument goes, Congress can stop what the White House wants to do, so you can't blame Obama for not winning more progressive victories.

I am fairly certain that people like Greenwald or Paul Krugman know how Congress works. Their criticism of Obama is more substantive--that the policies he advocates aren't very good even before one factors in what Eric Cantor or John Boehner are going to say about them.

The next part of his critique was even less convincing. Chait wrote that Obama's liberal critics think he should have been bolder on the economy, but there's a problem:

It's worth recalling that several weeks before Obama proposed an $800 billion stimulus, House Democrats had floated a $500 billion stimulus. (Oddly, this never resulted in liberals portraying Nancy Pelosi as a congenitally timid right-wing enabler.) At the time, Obama’s $800 billion stimulus was seen by Congress, pundits and business leaders--that is to say, just about everybody who mattered--as mind-bogglingly large. News reports invariably described it as "huge," "massive" or other terms suggesting it was unrealistically large, even kind of pornographic. The favored cliché used to describe the reaction in Congress was "sticker shock."

If I'm understanding this correctly, Chait is saying that media coverage of the debate over the stimulus was terribly misleading. That seems true. But how does that have any bearing on what his critics are saying? As this Firedoglake post pointed out, plenty of nonentities like Dean Baker, James Galbraith and Mark Zandi argued at the time that the stimulus wasn't large enough. If Chait's point is that these economists "don't matter" in elite circles, he might have a point. But that's a very different critique than the one he's making--and one that actually makes a lot more sense than his other argument.

Documents discovered in Libya suggest a close relationship between the Libyan government and the CIA. The New York Times described it this way on September 3:

TRIPOLI, Libya -- Documents found at the abandoned office of Libya's former spymaster appear to provide new details of the close relations the Central Intelligence Agency shared with the Libyan intelligence service -- most notably suggesting that the Americans sent terrorism suspects at least eight times for questioning in Libya despite that country's reputation for torture.

And then today (9/6/11) the Times put it this way:

The cooperation appeared to be far greater with the American intelligence agency, which sent terrorism suspects to Libya for questioning at least eight times, despite the country's reputation for torture. Britain sent at least one suspect, according to the documents.

As  Glenn Greenwald pointed out on Twitter (in fewer characters), the whole point of rendition was to send prisoners to countries the United States knew would treat them a certain way. It wasn't a series of accidents. In other words, the CIA used Libya not despite its reputation for torture, but because of it.

Seymour Hersh reports in the New Yorker (6/6/11--subscription required) that there is s virtually no evidence Iran has a nuclear weapons program, despite huge  efforts on the part of the U.S. to prove otherwise. Though Hersh's findings do not contradict the past two National Intelligence Estimates, they do fly in the face of long-held official and corporate media views.

Corporate media routinely treat the alleged Iranian nuclear weapons program as a matter of fact. New York Times reporter Michael Gordon has done it at least twice (2/24/03, 10/19/04), in one case suggesting that a U.S.-friendly regime in Iraq might pressure "Iran to halt its nuclear weapons program." With little variation in wording Gordon's Times colleagues Patrick Tyler  (6/27/05) and Scott Shane (3/26/05) have done the same.  So has the Washington Post's Walter Pincus and Karen DeYoung (9/28/09), and  Post editors and editorials routinely treat Iran's nuke program as a proven fact (e.g., 9/11/10, 6/17/09).

So it's not a big surprise that Hersh is coming under fire in in a corporate media which has largely internalized successive White House claims on Iran.

In a Politico report flagged by Glenn Greenwald , White House sources are quoted disparaging Hersh's New Yorker piece in a report the concludes by reminding readers that Hersh has been criticized in the past for relying too much on anonymous sources. Just a little problem with that angle though, as Greenwald points out:

That's the criticism that ends an article that relies exclusively on anonymous government sources, appearing in a D.C. gossip rag notorious for granting anonymity to any powerful figure who requests it for any or no reason.  The difference, of course, is that the Pulitzer Prize-winning, five-time-Polk-Award-recipient investigative journalist who uncovered the My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib scandal grants anonymity to those who are challenging the official claims of those in power (that's called "journalism"), while Politico uses it (as it did here) to serve those in power and shield them from all accountability as they spew their propaganda (which is called being a "lowly, rank Royal Court propagandist").

The civilian trial of terrorism suspect Ahmed Ghailani, who was linked to the U.S. embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya, was unsatisfying to those who believe that accused terrorists should not be tried in civilian courts. To them, the scoreboard tells the story: Ghailani was convicted on one count, and acquitted on over 280 other charges.

The newspaper headlines today lay out the problem:

USA Today (11/19/10):

Detainee's Acquittals Spark Debate Over Civilian Trials

Washington Post (11/19/10):

Verdict in Terror Case a Setback for Advocates of Civilian Trials

A more rational media system would discuss the verdict primarily as a result of the U.S. government's decision to torture detainees like Ghailani, who has been held at "black sites" and Guantanamo Bay. As Glenn Greenwald noted (Salon, 11/18/10):

Last month, the federal judge presiding over the case, Lewis Kaplan, banned the testimony of a key witness because the government under George Bush and Dick Cheney learned of his identity not through legal means but instead by torturing (and also possibly coerced the testimony of that witness).

The manner in which the government pressed the case against Ghailani was closely linked to these torture allegations. It's hard to have a serious conversation about the case without acknowledging this. And the fact that the trials excluded evidence allegedly obtained through torture is, as Greenwald argued, proof that the justice system was functioning properly.

When Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies appeared on FAIR's radio show CounterSpin last week, she challenged Barack Obama's assertions that U.S. combat in Iraq was ending and that the  last combat brigade was leaving the country, describing the plans the U.S. actually has in store for Iraq:

The policy has not changed. It is true that the number of troops are significantly lower than they were at their height of 165,000; it's now down to about 50,000. That's a good thing. Reduction in troops is a good thing. But the notion that this troop reduction somehow means that all combat brigades, let alone combat troops, are out of Iraq is just specious.

The 50,000 troops that are in Iraq now are combat troops. The Pentagon has, in their own words, remissioned them. They have given combat troops a new mission, which is for training and assistance of the Iraqi military. But they remain combat troops, ready to reengage in combat at any given moment.

We heard from President Obama about the Fourth Stryker Brigade, which is, as he described it, the last combat brigade leaving Iraq. We didn't hear about the 3,000 new combat troops, more combat troops, from Fort Hood in Texas, who were just deployed to Iraq about 10 days ago. We also didn't hear about the 4,500 special forces, which have the job, one, of continuing its counterterrorism operation, meaning using its capture-or-kill list to run around the country and capture or kill people. The other is to train their Iraqi counterparts, the Iraqi Special Operations Force, which is shaping up to be something that looks suspiciously like an El Salvador-style death squad. This is not the end of combat.

This was newsworthy enough, though few other media outlets challenged the White House "end of combat" hype. But Bennis had something even more troubling to add. When CounterSpin pointed out that John Pilger was reporting in the New Statesman that  U.S. policy with regard to airstrikes and bombings would be unaffected by the "new" policy, and that U.S. military contractors would be increasing in numbers, Bennis responded:

Absolutely. The number of contractors is quite disturbing, both in its own right and because it's the beginning of a process underway of militarizing U.S. diplomacy. There will be 7,000 new armed contractors coming into Iraq solely to work under the auspices of the State Department, not the Pentagon, when the State Department becomes the primary U.S. agency in Iraq. What we really didn't hear from President Obama is that the transition underway is not so much from U.S. control to Iraqi control as much as it is from Pentagon control to State Department control. The agreement that was signed between the U.S. and Iraq that requires, if it doesn't get changed--which is, I think, a likely possibility--required all U.S. troops and armed contractors under Pentagon control to be out of the country by the end of next year does not apply to contractors, armed or not, under the auspices of the State Department. So with this giant new embassy that holds 5,000 diplomats--it's the size of Vatican City--there will be at least 7,000 armed contractors. The State Department is bringing in armored cars, surveillance drones, planes and their own rapid response forces. So what we're seeing is the Pentagon leaving, largely, but the State Department taking on military tasks.

The planned militarization of the State Department has received some coverage in recent months. Stories by McClatchy's Warren Strobel, the Associated Press' Richard Lardner and Michael Gordon in the New York Times have reported on the State Department's new military role, fortress-like embassies, planned use of military contractors and purchase of military equipment, including Black Hawk helicopters and armored vehicles. According to AP's Lardner, State Department documents sent to the Pentagon last April reveal the agency expressing the need to "duplicate the capabilities of the U.S. military" by the end of 2011, when all American military forces are required to leave Iraq.

But journalists beguiled by the White House hype were apparently too busy perpetuating it to address such meddlesome details.

As Salon's Glenn Greenwald pointed out, NBC News anchor Brian Williams reported the withdrawal of combat forces without qualification (8/18/10): "It's gone on longer than the Civil War, longer than World War II.  And tonight, U.S. combat troops have pulled out of Iraq." Greenwald also cited liberal MSNBC commentators like Keith Olbermann, who touted the story as an historic event in a "special edition" of Countdown where his MSNBC colleague Rachel Maddow gushed about the last U.S. combat troop to leave Iraq: "We just saw, right here live with that gate closing, the last U.S. combat troop. I'm totally covered in goose bumps. It is an important moment.’"

Greenwald did offer deserved kudos to Associated Press standards editor Tom Kent, who instructed AP journalists in a memorandum to challenge the White House hype, writing, "To begin with, combat in Iraq is not over, and we should not uncritically repeat suggestions that it is, even if they come from senior officials."

But, overall, it was a bad showing by journalists, many of whom seemed more interested in regurgitating an officially endorsed feel-good story rather than the more complex truth that the U.S. military involvement in Iraq would  continue, and continue in some strange new ways.

Former Israeli soldier and current writer for the Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg has a long cover story (9/10) on the "better than 50 percent chance" that Israel will launch air strikes against Iran by next July, with the aim of taking out the alleged nuclear threat from the Islamic Republic. Based on roughly 40 interviews with American, Arab and Israeli officials--some of them anonymously--Goldberg meanders from describing the worst-case scenario for what will happen after Israel attacks Iran to relaying dubious Israeli claims about how Iran is the new Nazi Germany to an analysis of Netanyahu's relationship with his right-wing 100-year-old father. He does this while assuring readers that he is "not engaging in a thought exercise, or a one-man war game."

Goldberg's is just the latest in a line of recent stories from neo-conservatives and others on Israel or the U.S. bombing Iran (The Weekly Standard, 7/26/10; The Washington Post, 8/1/10).

Why anyone would listen to Goldberg or give him space in a magazine to hype up the threat from another Middle Eastern country is beyond comprehension, given Goldberg's role in printing propaganda about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and Iraq's ties to al-Qaeda (The New Yorker, 3/25/02; 2/10/03; Slate, 10/3/02). That turned out wonderfully, remember?

Ken Silverstein (Harper's, 6/30/06) is certainly shaking his head--he chronicled Goldberg's role in pushing for the Iraq War, writing that:

In urging war on Iraq, Goldberg took highly dubious assertions—for example, that Saddam was an irrational madman in control of vast quantities of WMDs and that Iraq and Al Qaeda were deeply in bed together—and essentially asserted them as fact...

Back in late 2003, at a panel discussion hosted by the New School for Social Research, the topic of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction came up. “Did the CIA simply mess up?” Goldberg asked Paul Wolfowitz. “Did I?” is the question he should have asked.

A lot has already been written about Goldberg's latest, so here's a selection of good analysis:

-Iran experts Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett on "the weak case for war with Iran" (Foreign Policy, 8/11/10).

-Jonathan Schwartz (A Tiny Revolution, 8/11/10) argues that Goldberg is "America's greatest foreign policy propagandist."

-Glenn Greenwald on why Goldberg's piece is "exhibit A" on "how propagandists function" (Salon, 8/12/10).

-Eli Clifton on how Goldberg's article "is part of a campaign to push the Obama administration into authorizing a U.S. military strike rather than having any particularly believable scoops about an impending Israeli attack" (Lobelog, 8/10/10).

-Matt Duss on why an attack on Iran would have a "low likelihood of success" but a "high likelihood of disaster" (Wonk Room, 8/11/10).

-Paul Woodward on how the article is part of a campaign to put the Obama administration in a box to get the U.S. to bomb Iran (War in Context, 8/11/10).

-Tony Karon on Goldberg being willingly used by both U.S. and Israeli officials to "send messages" about both countries' postures toward Iran (Rootless Cosmopolitan, 8/12/10).

Octavia Nasr has been a Mideast correspondent for CNN for 20 years, and was their senior editor of Mideast affairs. Until yesterday.

On hearing of the death of a Hezbollah leader, she posted the following on her Twitter feed:

Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah. One of Hezbollah's giants I respect a lot.

This expression of sympathy offended some, who were outraged that a journalist would say anything like that about anyone associated with Hezbollah. Nasr explained in a follow-up on CNN's website:

I used the words "respect" and "sad" because to me, as a Middle Eastern woman, Fadlallah took a contrarian and pioneering stand among Shia clerics on woman's rights. He called for the abolition of the tribal system of "honor killing." He called the practice primitive and nonproductive. He warned Muslim men that abuse of women was against Islam.

This was interesting background--the kind of depth one might expect from a reporter with a few decades of experience in the region. But CNN decided that this was not good enough. An internal memo explained that CNN thinks "her credibility in her position as senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs has been compromised going forward."

Now it can't be that errant Twitter messages are the problem at CNN; they recently hired Erick Erickson as a commentator, even though he had called retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter a "goat-fucking child molester." And it can't be that CNN has a problem with opinionated journalists; after all, they spent several years defending Lou Dobbs' hateful, inaccurate anti-immigrant rants.

Nasr was not fired for anything she uttered on CNN's airwaves. And it's hard to imagine that Nasr has a "credibility" problem based on her message. CNN, on the other hand, does have one, since this decision seems to raise serious questions about exactly what sort of policy exists at the network to handles such  questions about "credibility."

Salon's Glenn Greenwald (7/8/10) notes that, oddly enough, there are an astonishing number of cases of people working in the  "liberal media" who got into hot water for being perceived as too far to the left.  It's hard to think of many examples of corporate media careers that were ended by being too far to the right.

UPDATE: The website of Time magazine (7/6/10)--which, like CNN, is owned by the Time Warner media conglomerate--features a column by ex-CIA officer Robert Baer about Fadlallah's passing. He calls him a "central figure in modern Middle Eastern history," and notes that the Reagan administration was wrong about his actual role within Hezbollah:

In the 1980s, Fadlallah was at the top of the Reagan administration's enemy list. The White House mistakenly believed he was the spiritual leader of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group the U.S. was at war with at the time.

And:

The problem is, there never has been a shred of evidence that Fadlallah was responsible for the Marine bombing, other than his preaching against foreign occupation. But in that sense, he was no different from Lebanon's other Muslim clerics who also did not want foreign troops in the country. Fadlallah was with near certainty not involved in Hezbollah's terrorist attacks in Lebanon. In fact, he complained privately about the Iranians--through their proxy, the Islamic Jihad Organization--taking hostages in his country, believing it was un-Islamic.

Baer's Nasr-esque conclusion should provoke considerable alarm, though:

But at the end of the day, he was an independent Arab voice, a Shi'a Muslim courageous enough to stand up against Iran. In that sense, we should regret his passing.

I understand the difference between a reporter (Nasr's former role) and a columnist (Baer's current gig at Time)--though a shorter version of Baer's column appeared as an obituary for Fadlallah on the Milestones page of Time's print edition (7/19/10).  So will Baer's column attract similar outrage? If not, why not?

Salon's Glenn Greenwald has an illuminating post (6/27/10) that argues that the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, with his "self-praising, desperately insecure need to tout his own wisdom, knowledge and expertise, while demeaning those who are not admitted to his Special Club...is a perfectly illustrative face of the American establishment media." Responding to Goldberg's assertion (Atlantic, 6/25/10) that the resignation of Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel after making anti-conservative comments in what he thought was a private forum reflected "a lack of adult supervision, and...the proper amount of toilet-training," Greenwald wrote:

In his first post arguing that Weigel's hiring evinced the Post's journalistic decline, Goldberg relied upon "one of [his] friends at the Post," to whom he granted anonymity to trash Weigel as an "idiot" and someone who has "destroyed" the paper's reputation.  Just think about that: In the very same post where Goldberg pretentiously grieved for the collapse of journalistic standards, his "source" was a cowardly "friend" of his at the Post who was granted anonymity solely to spit out catty, petulant name-calling.  Is that supposed to be journalism: granting anonymity to your friends to puke up conclusory condemnations of other reporters?  That's like lamenting the decline of American journalism while quoting the answers provided by one's Ouija board.

Greenwald has a lot more to say about Goldberg as an exemplar of what's wrong with corporate journalism.

NPR's Brooke Gladstone (On the Media, 6/11/10) interviewed CNN's Ed Henry about the squirt-gun party at the vice president's mansion that Henry giddily tweeted about:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: If these events don't influence coverage, why do you think the White House throws them? Do they just want to shoot you with a super-soaker?

ED HENRY: Maybe they wanna actually get to know us as people sometimes.

And Glenn Greenwald (Salon, 2/15/10) comments:

Marc Ambinder disclosed that it was the DNC that paid for the party.  But Ed Henry thinks that they do that because Rahm Emanuel and Joe Biden and the other White House officials just decided they wanted an opportunity to get to know Ed and Wolf and the other members of the media just a little bit better as people.  They want to get behind the facade of the grizzly, ornery reporter and get in touch with the Real Ed, the Human Being.  That's how CNN's senior White House correspondent thinks.

Salon's Glenn Greenwald has had a couple of posts (2/18/10, 2/22/10) on a New York Times op-ed (2/18/10) that urged the U.S. to not worry so much about killing civilians in Afghanistan. The piece was written by Lara M. Dadkhah, who is vaguely identified as an "intelligence analyst" and who notes that she is "employed by a defense consulting company." Greenwald's second post reports that Dadkhah actually works for Booz Hamilton, a very well-connected military and intelligence contractor.

Greenwald quotes from a response that media critic Charles Kaiser got from Times op-ed editor David Shipley when he asked about Dadkhah's op-ed: "We found Ms. Dadkhah from work she did in Small Wars Journal, work that was part of her Ph.D. dissertation at Georgetown." As Greenwald notes:

Shipley's answer strongly suggests that Dadkhah did not submit her op-ed unsolicited, but rather, the NYT purposely sought out an op-ed to urge more civilian deaths in Afghanistan....  Why would they do that?  Maybe tomorrow the NYT editors can actively solicit an op-ed urging the use of biological agents and chemical weapons on civilian populations in Yemen.  After that, they can search out someone to advocate medical experiments on detainees in Bagram.  Perhaps the day after, they can host a symposium on the tactical advantages of air bombing hospitals and orphanages as a means of keeping local populations in line.

Greenwald writes, "When Dadkhar reads things like this from today -- 'Airstrike kills dozens in Afghanistan . . . . Ground forces at the scene found women and children among the casualties' -- she presumably thinks:  'Yes, that's exactly what we need more of.'" One wonders if Shipley and the rest of the team at the New York Times felt a similar sense of satisfaction.

Glenn Greenwald (Salon, 1/12/10) makes an excellent point about the corrosive effect of the widespread use of anonymous sourcing by the most powerful U.S. news outlets. After listing a number of false stories that got prominent coverage in U.S. media, Greenwald writes:

Unjustified anonymity--especially when mindlessly repeating what shielded government sources claim in secret--is the single greatest enabler of false and deceitful "reporting."... None of the falsehoods documented here will ever lead to any accountability, because the identity of the falsehood-producers will be shielded by their loyal journalist-servants, and the journalists themselves will simply claim that they wrote what they did because their hidden sources told them to.  That's not only the effect, but the intent, of the central method of American journalism:  to disseminate outright falsehoods to the American public and ensure that neither the liars nor their loyal message-carriers ever face any consequences or even reputational loss.... Lying is so much easier--and thus so much more common--when you get to do it while remaining hidden.

Greenwald complains that reporters who quote anonymous sources "barely even bother any longer to explain why it's justified, notwithstanding numerous policies of media outlets requiring exactly that explanation." Actually, though, such policies are generally taken to mean that the news outlet should explain why the source wanted to be anonymous--an explanation that generally boils down to the idea that the source wasn't authorized to speak on the record.  That's fairly useless.

A potentially more helpful rule would require the news outlet to explain, every time it quoted an unnamed source, why this particular quotation deserved to be an exception to the general rule that anonymity is to be avoided. Such a rule might actually discourage some of the more pernicious examples of anonymity--or at least produce some revealing rationalizations.