Jack Shafer

At the age of 70, Michael R. Bloomberg nears an actuarial end that not even his $22 billion net worth can reverse. By giving him a measly 13 years of life expectancy, the law of averages has made the New York mayor acutely aware of time. In 2006, he installed a countdown clock in his mayoral headquarters that marked time until the end of his second term. As his third term commenced in 2009, Bloomberg escalated his war on time, putting a stopwatch to meetings. Was he racing the clock, or, as the co-inventor of the Bloomberg Terminal, did he think that a firmer grasp on life’s raw data would prolong his life?

Before he’s ushered to his reward, Bloomberg – whose current term as mayor ends at the close of 2013 – yearns to do something as grand as revolutionizing Wall Street, making billions, and running New York City government. Ordinary billionaires find this sort of psychic remuneration in philanthropy, but Bloomberg, a generous donor, is no ordinary billionaire. Philanthropy gives him a kick, but not the kick he craves. Back in 2006, Bloomberg’s special something looked to be a presidential campaign. He took foreign policy lessons from a centrist, priced the cost of the race at an affordable $500 million, and played the big-town flirt as he explained to one news organization after another how he didn’t really want to run for president – while reminding them what a splendid president he would make.

He didn’t run because he came to understand that he couldn’t win as a Democrat, a Republican or an independent. It’s for the best that he didn’t become president: His idea of governance is giving orders, as if he’s the people’s CEO. It’s also for the best that when the Obama administration shopped him to fill the vacancy at the World Bank, as its president, he declined the position because he didn’t want a boss, as New York’s Gabriel Sherman reported.

So until the CEO of the Earth slot opens, Mr. Mayor, I’ve got a terrific idea for the last act: Convince the Washington Post Co’s CEO, Donald E. Graham, that he should spin off his Washington Post division and sell it to you.

I say that as neither a Bloomberg lover nor a Bloomberg hater. I’ve written approvingly of Bloomberg’s business success, admiringly of his Bloomberg Businessweek, disparagingly of his Bloomberg View, speculatively of his Bloomberg Government, and acidly of his mayoral reign. But for reasons financial, historical – and psychological – the sale of the Post to the tiny billionaire would produce the best outcome for Post readers, the Graham family (which controls the Post), and Bloomberg’s ego (in that order).

Others have urged Bloomberg to buy the pauperized New York Times, the Financial Times, or the Wall Street Journal. Adding a newspaper to the company portfolio has supporters inside the Bloomborg. Even the top Borg muses about buying one, according to an anecdote reported by Gabriel Sherman. A few years ago, Bloomberg was having breakfast with a friend in Paris and said: “Do you think I could buy the New York Times?” The friend replied that he didn’t think the hotel sold copies, and Bloomberg said: “No, do you think I could buy the Times?”

But don’t ask Bloomberg about buying the Times now. “It’s not for sale,” Bloomberg barked in March, after a member of the Newsday editorial board inquired. “And why would I want to buy the Times?” Well, perhaps because, despite all its flaws, the Times is the best paper in the land and because you and your subordinates are forever blabbing about your ambitions to build the most influential news organization in the world?

Bloomberg may not need a newspaper, but he wants one for the same reason he didn’t need a cable-TV channel, a weekly business magazine, a free website, or an opinion outlet, but still wanted one of each: for the publicity. Bloomberg is in the business of leasing financial terminals, which one recent estimate claimed produces 87 percent of the company’s revenues. Bloomberg’s 1997 autobiography, Bloomberg by Bloomberg, defends the extension of the Bloomberg brand into other media as a way to lease terminals. “Name recognition improves access for our [Bloomberg terminal] salespeople,” he wrote. “Every bit of publicity helps; you never know which imprint makes the difference.”

But a Bloomberg acquisition of the Times would be a disaster. The Sulzberger family, which controls the New York Times, has built a unique church of journalism over its 116 years of ownership, even adding a Manhattan cathedral for worship a few years ago. But it’s Times journalists who are in charge of interpreting the sacred texts, not the management. In 2003, the newsroom snuffed its executive editor, Howell Raines, for thinking he was the boss of them. It’s hard to imagine the newsroom accepting the Bloomberg bridle without bucking.

The Times‘s editorial page poses greater problems: It ranges well to the left of Mayor Bloomberg’s very personal centrism and has routinely clashed with him over everything from his soda ban to his stop-and-frisk police policy. The page has strong views on foreign policy, while Bloomberg (and Bloomberg View) has almost none. The entire paper is just too hidebound – and I mean that in a good way – to do anything but reject Bloomberg ownership. Times readers are equally hidebound. Would they tolerate the Bloombergization of their paper the way Wall Street Journal readers tolerated Rupert Murdoch’s remake of that paper? Would Bloomberg buy the Times and then just leave it as is, when the whole point of buying something precious is to make it yours? I think not.

The Financial Times would be easier on Bloomberg’s digestion, something Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief Matthew Winkler conceded to Gabriel Sherman. The FT‘s short and punchy approach to financial news parallels the comic tautness of Bloomberg News’s silly stylebook. The FT is strong in Europe, where Bloomberg could use help. But swallowing the FT would be a mere codicil to the Bloomberg legacy, as would buying the Wall Street Journal from Rupert Murdoch. The headline “International Business Media Conglomerate Buys International Business Daily” won’t excite many souls.

The Post Co’s sale of its Post newspaper division to Bloomberg, on the other hand, might not make much more noise, but as an unexpected event, it would make noise of a different quality. The paper is well known and respected around the world, even in places where people have never seen a copy: 90 percent of its online readership comes from outside the Washington area. Its business coverage, already saturated with Bloomberg News dispatches, is a blank slate upon which Bloomberg could write freely and claim intellectual ownership over.

First, of course, Bloomberg would have to convince Don Graham that he should sell. The paper means a lot to the Graham family, so it’s not a cinch. But the steady stream of bad business news coming out of the company is enough to persuade anybody to sell the newspaper division. Like most newspapers in the developed world, the Post is limping. In the first quarter of the year, its newspaper division reported an operating loss of $22.6 million; Post print advertising was down 17 percent; and Post daily circulation was down 9.8 percent (Sunday down 5.8 percent). Newsroom headcount has shrunk from a high of 900 to about 600 today. The whole company remains profitable, however, thanks to its diversification. It owns the Kaplan education outfit, television stations and a cable division, all of which remain in the black, so Don Graham needn’t sell the paper anytime soon to make his rent.

But not even a rich guy like Graham can shoulder losses forever, especially if they endanger the health of the greater company. He unloaded Newsweek in 2010 for $1 plus the assumption of millions in liabilities when he couldn’t stop the magazine’s cascading losses. Like Bloomberg, Graham, 67, has some tidying to do before he keeps his appointment with the actuarial table (about 16 years’ life expectancy in case you’re reading, Don), and securing the Post‘s future belongs at the top of the list.

The Graham-to-Bloomberg handoff makes historical sense if you track Post history back to 1933, when its playboy owner had driven it into receivership. Graham’s grandfather, Eugene Meyer, won the paper in a June 1 auction on the steps of the Washington Post building,  when his lawyer bid $825,000. Like Bloomberg, Meyer was silly rich: His stock in Allied Chemical alone was worth about $650 million in today’s money, according to Merlo J. Pusey’s 1974 biography of Meyer, and it paid dividends, dividends he used to sustain the paper for decades before it became a moneymaker.

Newspapers have long been rich people’s things. William Randolph Hearst, Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, “Jock” Whitney, Richard Mellon Scaife, Joseph Allbritton, convicted felon Reverend Sun Myung Moon, Mortimer Zuckerman, Philip Anschutz, and other moneybags squandered personal fortunes on the folly of newspapers over the past century. They did so because they expected newspaper ownership to be a source of power and influence, not red ink and heartache.

Eugene Meyer bought the Post with a clear head and big pocketbook. He intended to run it as a business, and did, but he also intended to provide a public service at the same time. Even the competition thought highly of Meyer. Frank Waldrop, once editor of the Washington Times-Herald, told one historian: ”Eugene Meyer ran an honest newspaper and a literate newspaper, he did not run a popular newspaper.”

You can scoff at that idea, but Meyer largely succeeded in separating his private interests from the paper’s reporting. It’s a tradition that the current regime subscribes to, and one that should attract Bloomberg, who has sought to make his news outlets “free of any outside influence, and not tied to some hidden agenda” (his words). I’ve read widely from the Bloomberg media corpus, and with the exception of a few ponderous Bloomberg View editorials, I’ve yet to detect their master’s voice speaking. (Or when I do, it’s sotto voce.)

The same can be said of the Washington Post‘s news pages. Quarrel all you want with the Post‘s journalism, but it’s a great paper, worth preserving for several more decades. I can’t think of a billionaire’s pocket I’d rather pick than Bloomberg’s to make it happen. He’d be much more likely to extend the Meyer-Graham news values than David Geffen, Richard Mellon Scaife, Philip Anschutz or a Russian oligarch.

Consider the many points of affinity between Bloomberg and Graham: Both believe in “straight” news pages. Both are vigilant beyondists, David Brooks’s label for people who insist that their politics are beyond left and right. Bloomberg is the more accomplished beyondist: A lifelong Democrat, he ran for mayor in 2001 as a Republican and then became a registered independent in 2007 while still serving. You’d be hard-pressed to slip a piece of paper edgewise between the beyondism of Bloomberg View editorials and the Post’s. As previously mentioned, the Post already runs substantial Bloomberg News coverage in its business pages, and the two organizations formed a joint news wire in 2010. Bloomberg and Graham enjoy a friendly, towel-snapping relationship, as shown by Graham’s introduction (audio) of Bloomberg at a 2006 event. And just last month, Graham joined the Bloomberg “family,” marrying Amanda Bennett, an executive editor at Bloomberg News.

One loser in the transaction would be Katharine Weymouth, Don’s niece and current Post publisher, who wouldn’t be able to hand the paper over to a family member the way Meyer handed it over to Philip and Katharine Graham, and Katharine Graham handed it over to Don. A pity, for sure, but as a great man once noted, family companies that struggle to maintain the traditional family businesses end up becoming prisoners of those assets. The Washington Post Co can support the Washington Post for a long time, helping it evolve into whatever it needs to evolve into. But will a long time be long enough?

Just as the Washington Post name was worth seven times its physical assets when Eugene Meyer bought it, today’s Post is worth far more than its presses, buildings, delivery trucks, computers and furniture. If the many newspapers of the bankrupt Tribune Co (Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Orlando Sentinel, etc.) are worth $623 million, the Post has to be in Bloomberg’s price range. He doesn’t mind spending large amounts on news organizations, having recently acquired the Bureau of National Affairs, the professional and government news outfit, for $990 million.

I’m not instructing Bloomberg to buy the Post as an act of charity but as a business proposition. For many inside and outside the Beltway, the Post means serious coverage of politics, the economy, government and foreign affairs. Combining the Post newsroom and name with Bloomberg’s news network (more than 2,200 editorial hands around the world), the Bureau of National Affairs (600 reporters, lawyers and editors), and the company’s other outlets would spawn an unstoppable news machine. Imagine the journalistic permutations: A beefed-up daily Post (more business than the Times, more politics than the Journal), a niche publication to counterattack Politico, a refashioned website to dominate the political and economic discussion, and a breakthrough Web-based TV news site. His terminal would overfloweth with quality news!

Great newspapers don’t happen by accident. They are acts of will, as the Ochs-Sulzberger family proved at the New York Times, Otis Chandler proved at the Los Angeles Times, Barney Kilgore proved at the Wall Street Journal, and the Meyer-Graham regime has proved at the Post. Purchasing the Post would give Bloomberg a chance to join this pantheon and seal his legacy. Few people care about the grand works of retired politicians. In a few years, we’ll have forgotten who was New York mayor between 2001 and 2013 and be fuzzy on the origins of the proposed ban on 32-ounce sodas. Trivia questions will start: “Was it Giuliani or Bloomberg who…” In 20 years the Bloomberg  Terminal will carry no greater cultural resonance than the Xerox machine, and every penny Bloomberg ever donated to Johns Hopkins University will have been spent and faded.

Investing a chunk of his $22 billion fortune on the Post won’t make Mike immortal, but it will leave him well remembered. Hardly anybody remembers Eugene Meyer’s millions or his chairmanship of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System or his World Bank presidency. They remember that he established the modern Washington Post.

I, for one, wouldn’t make a fuss if he observed company custom by renaming the paper the Bloomberg Post.

******

Disclosures: My employer, Thomson Reuters, competes directly with Bloomberg LP. My wife works at the Post. I was a Washington Post Co employee at its Slate division from the time the Post Co bought the site (2004) until I was let go (2011) with several other staffers. The company always treated me well. If this deal goes through, I expect a finder’s fee! Also, the actuarial table gives me a stinking 21 years to live. Send data about your expected life expectancy to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com and kill yourself by following my Twitter feed. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns.

PHOTO: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, co-chairman of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, is pictured in front of the U.S. Capitol during a media event about new legislation to amend the background check system for guns, in Washington, March 15, 2011. REUTERS/Jason Reed

This review originally appeared in the Washington Post on May 6, 2012, and is being reprinted by permission of the Post.

Jeff Himmelman uses his new book, Yours in Truth, to take shots at Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and their 1974 book, All the President’s Men. But Himmelman’s fire does not come from the usual redoubt of Watergate revisionism. He is a former researcher for Woodward, one who worked so diligently on Maestro the reporter’s 2001 book about Alan Greenspan, that Woodward gushed about him in his author’s note.

“Jeff Himmelman,” he wrote, “was my full-time collaborator at every step of this book—reporting, writing and editing. … A truly remarkable man of unusual maturity, brainpower and charm, Jeff is an original thinker who retains a deep sense of idealism. … This book would never have been completed without him, and it is his as much as mine. I consider him a friend for life.”

After he finishes reading Yours in Truth, Woodward will probably consider a different sort of life sentence for Himmelman.

Although former Washington Post executive editor Benjamin C. Bradlee gets top billing in Himmelman’s book, he plays a supporting role, not the lead. The book is chockablock with Bradlee—drawing on more than 60 boxes containing his papers and other private archives, and countless hours of interviews with him and his colleagues, to tell the story of his life, which Bradlee already covered in his 1995 autobiography, A Good Life. But the genuine subject is Woodward.

Himmelman publicly signaled as much last Sunday when, before the book’s release, he published an excerpt on the Web site of New York magazine. He capitalizes on an unpublished 1990 interview in which Bradlee discussed his “little problem with Deep Throat,” the code name for Woodward’s legendary Watergate source, Mark Felt. Of the clandestine parking-garage meetings with Deep Throat that Woodward convened by moving a flower pot on his apartment balcony, Bradlee expressed doubts. “There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight,” he said.

Himmelman’s other blast criticizes Woodward and Bernstein for being less than honest about how successful they were in their efforts to interview members of a Watergate grand jury. The duo has long maintained that they did not reap any information from the grand jurors they approached. But a memo in Bradlee’s papers, written by Bernstein at the time of the Watergate investigation, indicates that they did talk to a grand juror.

Such shots land hard on Woodward and Bernstein, but will they cause lasting damage?

Himmelman attempts no deep forensic study of what he found in Bradlee’s boxes, contrary to what you’d expect of an investigative reporter challenging the legend of Woodward and Bernstein. Instead, he gives the reader long, descriptive and dialogue-rich passages in which he confronts Bradlee — and then Woodward and Bradlee—with his findings. It’s almost like reading one of the spectacular fly-on-the-wall scenes from a Woodward book, except in Yours in Truth, all the flies are on the record and the stakes aren’t as quite as global or spectacular.

Say what you will about Woodward and his reportorial techniques—and many journalists and scholars have weighed in—All the President’s Men has withstood rigorous scrutiny over the past four decades. Entire books have been dedicated to its examination. While its treatment of Watergate is not complete or perfect, the book is a powerful document of the investigation.

One of the more appealing aspects of All the President’s Men is the authors’ willingness to portray themselves in a less-than-flattering light. Bernstein is shown trampling ethics and possibly breaking the law by asking an employee at a credit card company, and another at a telephone company, to lift records. Woodward repeatedly expands his agreement with Deep Throat, phoning him after promising to stay away from the phone and quoting him anonymously in the paper after vowing never to do so. And by quoting Deep Throat at length, All the President’s Men violates the sourcing arrangement completely.

So the idea that Woodward and Bernstein would push the envelope to get a story is not revelatory: They confess to their methodology in their book.

What, then, to make of Bradlee’s doubts? Of the grand jury memo?

As I read Bradlee, what he’s doubting are the highly dramatic scenes in All the President’s Men, not the Watergate findings in the book. Arranging flower pots to set up meetings with a source inside a parking garage may sound like something out of Austin Powers, but let’s remember that Deep Throat’s first suggested signal was for Woodward to leave his apartment drapes open, which Woodward rejected because he likes sunshine. Also, the reporter devised an alternate method to set up the meetings: a telephone call that did not identify him.

The skullduggery behind the flower-pot signals and coded messages completely fit the man Deep Throat was, one experienced in counterintelligence. Deep Throat may have thought the tradecraft made him safe, or he may have used it to impress Woodward with what an important, inviolable source he was.

Woodward and Bernstein fill All the President’s Men with their heavy breathing, which is one of the things that makes it so readable. For instance, after Deep Throat warns Woodward that his inquiries are putting lives in danger, Woodward and Bernstein storm Bradlee’s home after 2 a.m. with the news. The next day, the two reporters have a meeting with The Post’s top editors, Bradlee included, where, as Woodward writes in The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat, veteran editor Richard Harwood “thought we had finally gone around the bend and that our coverage was nearing the edge of fantasy, a kind of paranoid delusion of persecution.”

Yes, the pair overdramatized their story, but it’s likely they considered their book a form of cinema verite. If your best source told you your life was in danger, you might appear overdramatic and delusional to others.

Himmelman’s grand jury revelation is difficult to parse because it’s impossible to determine what he’s found and what precise deceit Woodward and Bernstein allegedly committed. Himmelman writes that a Bernstein source code-named “Z” in All the President’s Men was “a grand juror in disguise,” which contradicts the reporters’ claim that they did not get any information from the grand jurors they contacted. Woodward and Bernstein responded to Himmelman’s charge in full on The Post’s Web site last week, conceding that Z was a grand juror but that Bernstein didn’t know that until he visited her and she volunteered it. They insist that they elided her grand juror status in their book to protect her identity.

How important was Z? Woodward loosely equates her cryptic hints with those of Deep Throat (and other sources) in a scene in All the President’s Men in which he visits Sen. Sam Ervin, chairman of the Senate Select Committee to Investigate Campaign Practices.

Himmelman writes, “If they were willing to dress Z up, might they not have hung something extra on Deep Throat, too?”

It would take the brain of a Jesuit tandemed with that of a Talmudic scholar to answer this question. Does masking the identity of Z, along with a lack of candor over what they learned from the grand jury, mean that Woodward and Bernstein would have fabulized about Deep Throat? Not in my mind. At best, Himmelman appears to have caught the reporters in either a small lie or a narrow truth about Z and the grand jury. That can’t lead to faking facts about Deep Throat unless Himmelman can point to something stronger than the doubts in Bradlee’s 1990 interview—which he doesn’t.

It’s a pity that Himmelman didn’t confront Woodward and Bernstein over the Z memo for his book and give them a chance to mount a sustained defense. Instead, he conducted an unrewarding interview with them via conference call for the New York magazine excerpt.

If the Woodward and Bernstein story is the meat in this sandwich, Bradlee’s career, before and after Watergate, is the bread. Himmelman admits that some of the bread he serves is pretty stale, conceding that “nearly all of the good stuff” from the 1990 interviews that Bradlee conducted with his researcher “went wholesale into Ben’s memoir.” The bread isn’t tasteless, though. Himmelman makes better use of material from the decades-long Grant Study of Adult Development of Harvard students, of which Bradlee was one, than Bradlee did in A Good Life.

He also brings readers up to date on Bradlee’s life since 1995, when his memoir appeared, though the audience for the period must be limited. If you’ve read A Good Life and Katharine Graham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography, Personal History, this book will strike you as a bit of a yard sale of the Bradlee archives.

It didn’t have to be that way. The book appears to have originated as an idea of Bradlee’s wife, Sally Quinn, who wanted her husband to write another book about himself and drafted Himmelman as his assistant. He was a credible choice, having impressed Woodward and aided Ben and Sally’s son, Quinn, in writing his memoir, A Different Life: Growing Up Learning Disabled and Other Adventures.

Had the archives been dropped on a master of narrative journalism, such as Richard Ben Cramer, or a press scholar, instead of a trusted intimate of the Bradlee family, perhaps a great work could have surfaced. Instead, we’re stuck with a book that has the flavor of a Woodward production without any of the substance.

******

Who grilled Sloan in the kitchen? (That will make sense only to those who know All the President’s Men and Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor.) See if you can be more obscure in email to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. My Twitter feed’s flower pot is flying its red flag. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

Washington’s anonymous sources are disagreeing with one another today.

In the lead story in today’s New York Times (“U.S. Debated Cyberwarfare in Attack Plan on Libya”), the anonymous sources tell reporters Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker that the issue of whether or not to attack Libya with cyberweapons was “intensely debated” by the Obama administration last March.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post‘s catch-up story by Ellen Nakashima that runs on A5 in today’s print edition, disputes an important element of the Times revelation. Relying on its own anonymice, the Post piece confirms that a cyberwarfare debate took place but asserts unequivocally that the debate “did not reach the White House” according to Pentagon officials. [Emphasis added.]

Obviously, either the Times or the Post owes its readers a correction because the administration cannot have “intensely debated” cyberwar against the Libyan military at the same time that it did not. Such  a fundamental contradiction screams out for a follow-up story by both papers, but will we see them?

Probably not, because the whole genre of anonymously sourced Washington journalism avoids the basic accountability that comes with on-the-record attribution. Speak an untruth on the record to a Washington reporter and he will hound you for an explanation. Speak the same untruth to a Washington reporter as an anonymous source and the reporter will probably insist on taking you to lunch to pump you for more information and only gently chide you for your misdirection.

Washington reporters care for, feed, and coddle their anonymous sources because reporters here outnumber important sources by at least 100 to one. The lopsided supply and demand permits important sources to dictate the terms of engagement, and anonymity is one of the terms they often demand. Anonymity allows them to dictate or spin a story to their advantage while suffering no liability for what they say.

The reporters behind the opposing stories are talented and deeply tapped in. Timesmen Schmitt and Shanker are particularly well versed in the subject of cybercapabilities, having recently published a book about the Pentagon’s secret wars against Al Qaeda. The Post‘s Nakashima similarly has a number of solid bylines on the topic of cyberwar to her credit.

But the differences between the two stories are dramatic. The Times makes it sound as if the Pentagon and the White House conducted a spirited trans-Potomac conversation about contaminating the Libyan military’s computer grid, which means the Obamaites were open to the idea. The Post makes the discussion sound more like a Pentagon rap session than deliberations over escalating the Libyan war. (Odd, isn’t it, that the decision to bomb radar installations—and kill people in the process—came easily, but the decision to dispatch a virus to infect those same radars and not kill people is still on-going? But that’s the topic of a different column.)

The Times piece gives credence to the Post‘s interpretation in several passages, most notably writing that “the cyberwarfare proposals were rejected before they reached the senior political levels of the White House.” If the proposals reached only junior political levels of the White House, it seems misleading to describe those conversations as “intensely debated” inside the “Obama administration,” which is what the Times does. Other reasons to speculate that the Times inflated its story: The “previously undisclosed debate” took place “among a small circle of advisors” and, “The debate about a potential cyberattack against Libya was described by more than a half-dozen officials.” So the “debate” was small and the sourcing pool was small, too.

But there’s a case to be made for the Times‘s interpretation of events. The Post‘s equally anonymous story was published after the Times‘s, which was posted to the Web on Monday, so one way to critically read it is not as a news story but as an answer by the Post‘s White House anonymous sources to the Times‘s Pentagon anonymous sources. Viewed this way, the Post and its sources are saying, move along, never happened, to the assertion by the Times and its sources that we came this close to declaring cyberwar.

The Post‘s account invites skepticism if only because its biggest news—that the debate did not reach the White House—is ascribed to “officials.” Well, of course “officials” are the sources, as opposed to stumps and rocks. But in which bureaucracy–Pentagon or the White House–are these “officials” located?

When anonymous sources duel like this in the pages of the Times and the Post, there’s often a more nuanced power struggle going on than the press corps can detect. Not to get all Rashomon on you, but the identity of a story’s sources is as important as what the sources said. When a newspaper fails to name its sources—as the Times and the Post did today—it invites skepticism, disbelief, doubt, and suspicion from readers, making press critics of us all.

*****

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PHOTO: A laboratory mouse. (Credit : Dennis Thiele/University of Michigan)