This is where I stopped reading. This article is poorly disguised political hackery. It takes very little evidence to suggest the silliest notion about your political enemies these days.
When they do that, you should treat the people with the byline on the article as having said it themselves and then evaluate what evidence (if any) they can give for that and whether they have an ulterior motive (e.g. being a partisan hack).
>If a journalist cites an anonymous source that is more substantial than a random rumor that somebody just made up. Usually it is corroborated and the sources’ credibility is taken into account. >Just because you don’t like what the anonymous sources have to say doesn’t mean that it’s worthless.
This is a great way to let your bias do your thinking for you and I'll have no part of that. Why do I say it's your bias? Because you have literally nothing but your subjective judgement to base your opinion on in this case. After all, if you have something else, why are you trying to judge the reliability of a random, anonymous rumor in the first place?
Just because you are not in a position to independently verify every fact that gets reported doesn’t mean that it isn’t true. It’s ok to be skeptical, but you seem to be taking it to an extreme.
So you've misunderstood what I'm saying quite badly.
I base my views on those things that can be verified, not on all the stuff that cannot be. That said, I do not suffer from Gell-Mann amnesia. I'm under no delusion that most reporters are doing anything more high-minded than trying to be the first to summarize the next big story. Nor do I normally suppose that they are experts on most subjects, particularly those like law, technology or medicine, though they have hopefully summarized an actual expert to the best of their understanding. And yes, the precious few who actually are experts of some kind (e.g. Volokh) are given due credit in the realm of their expertise and generally the sort I favor reading.
I therefore tend to seek out actual, primary sources (the relevant scientific paper, actual legal scholars, the text of the actual law, etc.) and use those, rather than some reporter's rushed summary thereof, to inform myself on any matters of actual importance. So the reporters I find more credible are the ones who actually bother to link to these primary sources when they're available online.
That usually means reading more from people like, say, Volokh, Popehat or the SCOTUSblog and less of CNN. Yes, I know Chris Cuomo is an attorney, but he gets special demerits for getting the law wrong (and having gotten called on it by many lawyers with more experience).
There are legitimate reasons to keep sources anonymous, especially as it pertains to criminal investigations. Journalists have legal protections that allow them to keep the identities of their sources private. I understand that it's suboptimal to appeal to authority and say that you should just trust Woodward and Bernstein on the matter, but that authority was hard-earned over a long period of time. It should not be discounted.
You're confusing what might be true with what's provable. The fact that they're anonymous rumors means they're unprovable for the public (but, importantly, not necessarily for the journalist who should be using them to dig up verifiable facts).
You're also ignoring that they uncovered many facts which could be verified, which one should pay attention to, while ignoring the unverifiable bits.
If you're going to bring up Watergate, don't forget the words "Trust, but verify." We're not able to do that last part. Therefore we ignore the rumors--that is, we neither believe them nor assume to be false.
Anything else is simply irrational. This sort of "reasoning" simply makes one gullible. You'll have nothing to fall back on but your own assumptions when the question of how you know which rumors can be trusted comes up.
The only assumptions I had made is that you rarely argue with women and that you don't assault them (or people in general, which let's pretend is true for the sake of the argument), everything is factual. See why this kind of framing is dishonest?
Just because you don’t like what the anonymous sources have to say doesn’t mean that it’s worthless.
>Just because you don’t like what the anonymous sources have to say doesn’t mean that it’s worthless.
I tend to be suspicious of anonymous sources a lot of times even when they say what I like. That statement was just a baseless assumption about me on your part.