Latest "news" -- from "sources":

Family sources have told how the 59-year-old president was caught by First Lady Laura downing a shot of booze at their family ranch in Crawford, Texas, when he learned of the hurricane disaster.

His worried wife yelled at him: "Stop, George."

Following the shocking incident, disclosed here for the first time, Laura privately warned her husband against "falling off the wagon" and vowed to travel with him more often so that she can keep an eye on Dubya, the sources add.

"When the levees broke in New Orleans, it apparently made him reach for a shot," said one insider. "He poured himself a Texas-sized shot of straight whiskey and tossed it back. The First Lady was shocked and shouted: "Stop George!"

What is a "source"?

This is an issue that simply will not go away, and the more I look into it, the more problematic it becomes. Wikipedia recites a definition so superficial as to seem almost circular in nature:

In journalism, a source is a person, publication or other record or document that gives information.

Seek Truth and Report It

Minimize Harm

Act Independently

Be Accountable

All fine and good, but as we saw in New Orleans (more here, here, and here), despite the existence of guidelines or standards, MSM "sources" turned out to be themselves unsubstantiated or else the stories they told turned out to be absolute rumors without any basis in fact. This, of course, is one of the reasons I must maintain skepticism about certain aspects of the Hinrichs story -- particularly his alleged attendance at the local mosque. It is not enough for me to watch a video make this bare assertion based on the recital that "sources told" Channel 9 that they saw him go there. What sources? The place was right around the corner from where he lived, which could mean he walked past the mosque every day. They'll have to do better reciting "sources said" to make a credible case. (As Jeff at Caerdroia reminds via Glenn's update, there are named sources who contradict the unnamed sources....)

While such "sources said" allegations would never withstand scrutiny in court (for starters, they're hearsay), the concern here is not a legal one, but a moral one. What I want to know is how to discern what is true.

I write this blog, and I know that I have readers -- some of whom might trust me, and some of whom might not. If I assert that "a source" told me something, and I refuse to divulge the identity of the person, you can choose to believe me or not, but it's my reputation as a blogger (my ethos, if you will), that will ultimately make you decide the following:

And last but not least:

Clearly, there are a lot of assumptions underlying that bare assertion that "a source said" something.

Are there any standards? Mainstream media would have us believe that there are. Yet in the case of New Orleans, we saw the standards reduced to a level which might not have survived the editorial scrutiny of the National Enquirer or WorldNetDaily. And even now, such bastions of "reliable" journalistic "standards" as the American Journalism Review are actively promoting some of the most flagrantly self congratulatory pieces I have ever seen.

Like this dramatic exercise in hero worship from the WaPo's Marc Fisher:

The levees broke and the city joined the sea, and the cameras bore witness and the ink-stained scribblers rose up from a vale of troubles to chronicle the days of the fearful and the forgotten.

In this era of blogs, pundits and shouted arguments, the coming of Katrina reunited the people and the reporters. In a time of travail, parts of the media landscape that had seemed faded, yea, even discarded, now felt true.

The hurricane that laid waste to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast hit the land and its people with Biblical force, sending us in search of ancient verities: We needed to see for ourselves. We had to hear the stories of the people. We wanted to know what had happened.

So as the summer of 2005 came to a violent end, journalism journeyed back, setting aside for a few days the allure of the Internet and the promise of a nation of citizen reporters. Once again, we understood the power of mass media, the shared experience of a nation gathering in its living rooms to see momentous events on television, to feel the satisfaction of reading a newspaper's first shot at making sense of difficult and complex times. Web, schmeb: Without electricity, those who lived in the path of Hurricane Katrina depended on old battery-powered radios and whatever newspaper they could borrow for a few minutes from the guy in the next cot.

Katrina, however briefly, took us back to a simpler time. Audiences for the cable news channels tripled and more, but their combined numbers couldn't come close to those of any one of the old broadcast networks. The Internet would come to play an essential and innovative role in bringing people together, but only in the second phase of the coverage.

Or the attempt to retain it?

In another sefl-congratulatory editorial, AJR's Editor and Senior Vice President, Rem Rieder offers this platitude written in a tone one might normally associate with Thomas Jefferson:

Journalism matters.

We hold that truth to be self-evident. But in recent years the proposition has taken quite a battering.

The litany of woe for the proud but beleaguered profession is painfully familiar. The shrinking audiences. The endless string of plagiarism and fabrication cases. The Wall Street-fueled cutbacks. The post-9/11 timidity. The WMD blunder. It was almost enough to make the most starry-eyed optimist embrace the blogosphere's ubiquitous obits for the so-15-minutes-ago mainstream media.

Then Hurricane Katrina decimated the Gulf Coast and the Bush administration dithered and stumbled. And the MSM rose to the occasion.

That the media performed well is hardly a surprise. Journalists live to cover the big story. Acts of nature – what one writer I know calls "big weather" – have always brought out the best in reporters and news organizations.

Anyway, according to Mr. Rieder, the "best" included Brian Thevenot's reporting (which, as I discussed previously and repeatedly, included false rumors of murdered girls and 40 bodies dead in freezers), and comparisons to the war in Iraq and the movie "Hotel Rwanda"):

Let's hope Katrina buries forever the notion of false equivalency, the idea that fair and balanced reporting means giving equal weight to opposing positions, regardless of their merit.

The hurricane coverage also reminded us of the remarkable commitment journalists bring to their jobs. Exhibit A is the band of Times-Picayune staffers who remained in New Orleans to cover the flooding when their more sensible colleagues evacuated. One who stayed was Brian Thevenot, who recounts their extraordinary experiences in "Apocalypse in New Orleans" beginning on page 24.

(I've linked "Apocalypse" repeatedly, and discussed it in the above posts.)

However, I do agree with Mr. Rieder about "false equivalency," and I have discussed the fallacy he calls the "idea that fair and balanced reporting means giving equal weight to opposing positions, regardless of their merit."

The problem is, I don't think "equal weight" should be given to unsubstantiated rumors. But in New Orleans, rumors weren't merely given equal weight, they were presented as "truth to power."

If the pieces in the American Journalism Review are considered the journalistic equivalent of "peer review," why not simply go with the National Enquirer?

Or "alligations"! About alligators!

Let's talk rumors to power!