There's been a lot of interesting discussion over the last couple of days, both here at TPM and elsewhere, about the journalistic integrity of the NYT piece on McCain's association with Iseman.  I have some thoughts of my own, but I wanted to first state that I'm not a journalist.  I'm literate, I consider myself to be a student of history and I try to keep up with current events, but I have no journalistic training to speak of.  So, consider these to be not the words of an expert on journalism or its practices, but the words of a citizen and a (hopefully) savvy consumer of information.

I keep coming across criticism based on the timing of the article.  It isn't incumbent upon a newspaper to publish articles at a time that's politically expedient to any particular party.  This isn't to say that institutional bias doesn't exist or that these decisions and their motivations aren't worth looking into, but I get the sense that the practices of journalism strive toward a sort of objective fairness.  In an ideal world perhaps all stories would be published without concern for the political winds, but this isn't an ideal world.  Even so, I think that if you're going to question the timing of this story you ought to explain why you're questioning the timing here rather than the timing of any other story.  Is it because the story is bad for John McCain?  The story is bad for him truly, but it was never going to be good for him (and if he did indeed commit these indiscretions then this is entirely his responsibility.)  Surely no one would (outside of John McCain's lawyers) would suggest that this alone is a reason for a newspaper not to print a story.  No, I think the implication is that the timing was chosen by the NYT to harm the Republican party.  That's fine, but when you question the integrity of the story based on the quality of the evidence shouldn't you also hold yourself to a standard of evidence?  Is there a reason to question the timing of the story, some evidence of purely political motivation, or is it simply the "fact" that the NYT is part of the "liberal media" or that the story is simply bad for your team?

Then there is the issue of the anonymous sourcing in the article.  As I sad above, I have no journalistic training of any kind, but I'm aware of some of the history of anonymous sourcing in American journalism from Watergate to Plamegate.  I think anonymous sourcing can be seen, as so many things, to have an upside and a downside.  From my view, you're essentially trading the perception of the integrity of your story will have for access.  It's a good trade, because great stories can be told by losing a little of the hardness of your evidence and gaining information that you couldn't have had otherwise.  Then there are stories greater still that would never be told at all without the protection of identity offered to whistleblowers and other informants.

This dichotomy poses different challenges for the journalist and for the reader.  The journalist has a problem with anonymous sources only in terms of perception.  After all, the journalist gains more information by promising anonymity to sources and to the journalist the source isn't anonymous at all, thus allowing them to have confidence in the information.  However, then the reader must accept the confidence of the journalist as their own.

Or not.  The problem is one of perception and I think this is really where the controversy is here.  It's a matter of trust which goes hand in hand with reputation.  Generally, if you feel like you can trust the NYT, then your probably feel like this is a  legitimate story and that it could be of significant importance.  If you don't, then you probably perceive this story to be overly thin, perhaps even a non-story, without a named source.  So, I guess you just have to ask yourself if you trust the NYT.

This is somewhat unfortunate, because I think it leaves us to rely a bit on an appeal to authority, that we trust a newspaper because it's trustable.  This is poor reasoning and a poor justification for believing a news story by itself, but it's a kind of inductive reasoning that I don't think we can entirely get away from, at least not while maintaining the use of anonymous sources.  In the end, some measure of judgement must be employed on the part of the reader.

I think that right now we're seeing what looks like the downside of anonymous sourcing with this story.   This is the, "Oh yeah, says who?" moment.  Everyone in this situation is looking to the NYT to put up or shut up.  Time will tell if we come, as I think most did after Watergate, to look back and see the upside.