> No level of reputation or historical track record should exempt anyone from the basic responsibility of providing evidence for claims they make.
I'm not sure. Bloomberg and Reuters are two media outlets who regularly release information while only citing anonymous sources and not releasing any evidence.
Just posting proofster.png [1] doesn't undo America's long history of doing weird stuff to achieve its goals. Thinking about funding terrorism in Cuba, backdooring all electronic communication ever or saying that your President did not have a stroke.
Also, someone posted further down in the comments that the White House has a history of discrediting witnesses and questioning motives. [2] Interestingly enough, it appears to me that this tactic engages citizens to follow the ad hominem attacks of their policymakers, although they don't gain anything from doing so. Maybe this dynamic is even more interesting than the article itself because the causes of this crime are only for history books. America got what it wanted anyway, and nothing will change that.
>If we cite anonymous sources in a story, say how these people are in a position to know the information, without compromising their identities. Any anonymously sourced story must be reviewed by senior managers.
p. 112; The Bloomberg Way: A Guide for Journalists; John Micklethwait, Paul Addison, Jennifer Sondag, Bill Grueskin; John Wiley & Sons; 2017 ed.
> Bloomberg and Reuters are two media outlets who regularly release information while only citing anonymous sources and not releasing any evidence.
It's bad when they do it too. That's what Bloomberg did with their Supermicro Chinese chip story and it was a disaster (and one for which they still haven't apologized or really even acknowledged).
Huge allegations require evidence. Your name is not good enough, no matter what you've exposed in that past.
But maybe, just maybe, other people are willing to to accept claims backed by reputation.
I mean, do you have any idea how difficult some of these stories, throughout history, would be to bring to light with "hard evidence"? What would "hard evidence" even entail? A whistleblower?
I don't think Hersh's reputation is evidence, as such, although it has some persuasive value.
However, evidence is not the only valid form of claim-making. Predictive power also has value: if someone can assert something unlikely without evidence, but with sufficient specificity that it describes a subsequent development very accurately, then it's fair to presume that person probably has insight into the issue.
So while I am somewhat skeptical of Hersh's claims, they're also detailed enough that corroboration could be sought for.
No level of reputation or historical track record should exempt anyone from the basic responsibility of providing evidence for claims they make.