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Comment by tengbretson | Hacker News Reader

I think the key mistake was that the NY Post didn't cite "anonymous sources." That would have made it bulletproof.

These anonymous sources you mention are only anonymous to the readers. Typically a story from an anonymous source will be verified with multiple other sources, perhaps also anonymous, to make sure that the media source is not getting played. Here we have Hannity's former assistant writing a "sensational" story in a tabloid rated as the least credible news outlet in NY. Also, they apparently tried to keep their source anonymous but messed up. Really going to fall for this? Again?

I've long-since stopped listening to anonymous intelligence officials. Any time you get their quotes, you've got to flip a coin to decide whether it's a legitimate leak,or an attempt to direct the media narrative without putting the organization's reputation on the line.

Anonymous officials ready to support any given narrative seem to be a dime a dozen anymore.

Unless the leaked information is accompanied by an insurmountably huge collection of documents outlining a complex tapestry of affiliations, interests, and events such as the alphabet agencies are want to produce, I typically assume it's the latter.

The NYT doesn't get a pass from me just because it used to be great, and do the work requisite to earn its sterling reputation.

I honestly wish I could provide citations where they've fallen here, but most of them come from The Intercept's podcast (Intercepted, I recommend it), where Scahill's opening rants regularly take aim at publications across the spectrum's use of anonymous officials, and the questionability of the claims they cite, and it would be far too exhausting and disheartening to record them all. As petty as some of them have been, it's just background noise, anymore.

Instead of Guilianni, they could have just said "persons familiar with the contents of the emails."

That or "anonymous sources" wouldn't have helped. That works with papers that have a long earned reputation of mostly reporting facts. They may have biases in their selection of which stories to run, or what angles to approach those stores from, but what they report as a fact is in fact a fact far far far far more often than not.

(Pause for people to jump in to cite examples of such papers getting it wrong. This will be the small set of examples that is always cited).

The Post is not such a paper.

Let's see Twitter's list of trusted newspapers. No way such a thing exists.

Papers with long-earned reputations do themselves tremendous discredit when they hire full blown political activists with no regard for the truth, as the WP, NYT etc have done for at least a decade.

Serious question - How does that make it legitimate? In our eyes (the viewers) or twitter's terms&cond?

Twitter allows all sorts of garbage claims about Trump from mainstream media sources which simply cite "anonymous sources". Most recently the NYTimes claimed to have Trumps tax returns - without evidence verifying the authenticity. Over the last few years, Russiagate relied almost entirely on "anonymous sources" - and we all know how that turned out.

> and we all know how that turned out.

With a bunch of Trump campaign and administration officials admitting in federal court to collaborating with Russian government?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates...

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