The NYTimes and its use of anonymous sources in biz stories

Margaret Sullivan, the public editor of the New York Times, writes about how the paper’s business news desk used anonymous sources when writing that golfer Phil Mickelson was being investigated for insider trading.

Sullivan writes, “I talked with the business editor, Dean Murphy, on Tuesday about one of the cases mentioned above: A story that originally said that Phil Mickelson, the famous golfer, was being investigated for insider trading related to Clorox. (The article, which had a number of other components, appeared on the front page and was displayed prominently on the home page.)

“About a week later, a correction was added — and a new article acknowledged the error: The Times had ‘overstated the scope’ of the investigation. ‘While investigators are looking at his trading in some stocks, Clorox is not among them.’ (Other news organizations, Mr. Murphy noted, got it wrong, too.)

“The new article, even in debunking the first, also relied on anonymous sources, something noted by many of the outraged readers who wrote to me about this.

“Mr. Murphy said the second article could not be viewed as a true ‘corrective story,’ in Times parlance, since most of its elements were correct. And that article, he told me, advanced the overall information about the investigation. ‘We used it as a reporting moment,’ he said, not just a corrective.

“The original story’s sourcing was not taken lightly, he said. He was aware of who the sources were and that ‘they were trusted people that we had no reason to doubt — but they got it wrong.’ And, he said, the authors of the story, ‘are two of my best diggers,’ with reputations for caution and accuracy.”

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