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CM's avatar

She’s obviously done some great reporting that we might otherwise not have gotten, but just as sources need to trust her for her to be effective, she also needs to maintain credibility and trust with readers. The smart takes like this one defending her fail to address that issue: that people who are upset with her believe she’s been derelict in her duty to report information that has some bearing on constitutional order and national security. Do journalists have such an explicit duty? I don’t think so, and I believe many journalists would agree. And yet, I think there is a line which her reporting comes dangerously close to in this regard. Would this take pass the smell test if, say, Haberman knew that Trump had sold nuclear secrets to a foreign power, and instead of calling the FBI or reporting it in real time, she held on to it for her book? Based on her behavior to date, I don’t know if I’d put that past her — and I think that’s where “trolls” are coming from. Takes like this and the defensive posture of the Times, in which that line is not acknowledged or engaged with, frustrate just as much as they educate.

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Timothy Burke's avatar

First, I think Frank is right in his comment: Haberman has mixed it up with online critics a fair amount until more recently, and has sometimes been pretty combative and defensive in doing so (in a way that is shared by the NYT's editors and senior reporters generally, who often seem astonished to be held to account on some of the same principles and issues that they are holding others to account on).

Second, if you look at the way the NYT is now explaining--and arguably constraining--the use of unnamed sources in much of its reporting, I think you could partially credit that to some of the reaction to Haberman's reportage. I think we're past the moment where you can simply defend the heavy use of unnamed sources as normal practice that produces information that we would otherwise not have gotten. All the way back to Woodward and Bernstein establishing this as the new norm that defined investigative journalism focused on politics, there have been reasons to question both the information it produces and the ethics it normalizes. (In a way, all you need to know to ask those questions is the discrepancy between Deep Throat in Woodward's reportage and the reality of Mark Felt's career and outlook.) There have just been so so many examples of reporters who have been given misleading or partial information either to allow an administration (or single political figure) a chance to test out or float a possible initiative with deniability or to allow one person inside an administration to protectively burnish their reputation by burning someone else's, where the covenant between source and journalist plainly extends to providing said burnishing.

So while it may be unfair for these doubts to land with such a resounding and exclusive thud on Haberman's doorstop, Haberman's reportage sometimes quite legitimately raises those doubts. As many people have pointed out, Haberman quite clearly flacks for Ivanka and Jared at times, much as other reporters are often trying to help Mattis, Kelly or McMaster (who, to be fair, don't seem just about trying to burnish their own reputations but also trying to take down Trump out of genuine concern for the public interest). At the least journalists in general need to push their sources to go on the public record under their own names rather than instantly and easily allowing them the option of anonymity as if that is the only possible way to get some information.

I think maybe also assuming that the information we get via that kind of reportage is what is necessary to permit criticism of the conduct of political leaders has been a consistent problem for the Times and the WaPo as a whole and betrays the extent to which their editors would also like to be insiders to power. The public transcript is often perfectly adequate for that purpose. Without any anonymous insiders at all, journalists would still have had plenty of things to say about the ongoing catastrophe of Trump's presidency--and unusually in this case, the President's own shambolic public utterances on Twitter and at rallies often made it perfectly clear what he was thinking or intending or doing, as well as who might be influencing him. The desire to get an inside perspective was at least sometimes an almost-friendly gesture that implied that somehow behind the scenes there might be some more coherent, systematic, or intentional plan that Trump himself was distracting from. The reality now seems to be the opposite: Trump didn't just say the quiet parts out loud, but what he said was a fair picture of the chaos and cruelty of much of the policy he was actually shaping.

I think if reporters like Haberman were a bit less Woodward and a bit more I.F. Stone in the sense of having a stronger game as data journalists and a bit more courage as sociopolitical critics, there wouldn't be as much concern.

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