Anonymous sources, Trish Regan and business journalism

Felix Salmon of Reuters writes Monday about Bloomberg Television’s Trish Regan and her interview with Seeking Alpha CEO David Siegel where she was critical of his company’s refusal to disclose the name of an anonymous writer who had disclosed an investment by hedge fund manager David Einhorn.

Salmon writes, “Let’s say that the blogger in question had phoned up Regan and told her (off the record, but with Regan knowing her source’s identity) that Einhorn was buying up shares of Micron Technology. That might have turned into a nice little scoop for Regan, if she had confirmed it with other sources — all of whom would themselves surely have insisted on anonymity as well.

‘If Regan had published that story, Einhorn would surely have been annoyed, since he was taking great care to accumulate his stake in Micron as quietly as possible. But here’s the thing: Einhorn would never have dared take Regan and Bloomberg to court, trying to force them to reveal her sources. If a journalistic organization finds out a true fact and publishes it, that might inconvenience a hedge-fund manager, but it’s not going to result in a court case.

“In the Micron case, however, Einhorn saw an outlet which was small enough to bully. If he wins, as Sorkin says, ‘the case could have a chilling effect on the free flow of information to traditional news outlets’ — it would damage not only Seeking Alpha and its pseudonymous blogger, but also Trish Regan and all other journalists with confidential sources. Einhorn wants to be able to keep his own information confidential; he just doesn’t want Seeking Alpha to have a similar right.

“If anybody deserves a lecture on journalism in this case, then, it’s not Siegel, it’s Einhorn. Meanwhile, Siegel is faced with a very hard decision. Einhorn is not the kind of person to back down from a fight: he has essentially bottomless resources, and will happily spend millions of dollars on lawyers just to make Seeking Alpha’s life miserable and expensive for the foreseeable future. Big media organizations are set up to fight such threats; smaller startups aren’t.”

Read more here.