Sources: FBI Agents Want Congress To Issue Them Subpoenas So They Can Reveal The Bureau’s Dirt

jmotivator said:

My point is that the story here is that there are DOJ and FBI agents who want to come forward to give testimony on their experiences on the Clinton and Trump investigations. That story has a NAMED source, Joe DiGenova. Whatever these agents may want to say would be known if and when they come forward. That is very different than a story that says "Officials close to the investigation say that Trump will be arrested as early as next week." ... where the source is anonymous and has fear of repercussions for being wrong.

Click to expand...

Well...surely everyone, or at least everyone who is reasonable, has at least some fear of the repercussions of being wrong. The claim that these sources want to come forward is simply the repetition of an anonymous claim. The people who are claiming they want to come forward remain anonymous, and hence they can make those claims without fear of any repercussions. As I think I wrote in a previous post: if you don't trust anonymous sources, why do you trust the claim that they want to come forward? Because DiGenova says so? Why not trust what anonymous sources say because a known reporter says so? I'd appreciate it if you take these questions one by one and try to answer them all consistently. I think the only way you can would be to go back to the claim that the anonymous sources aren't making any claims.

Moreover, since we know the names of the reporters who publish stories based on anonymous sources, the same principles would seem to apply. We can judge based on what we know of the reporter and the news source how accurate they are. We can take the reporter to task if they turn out to be wrong. Indeed, I would suggest that given there have been a few high-profile cases of journalists caught making stuff up and suffering life-ruining consequences as a result, journalists are probably more afraid than are most people. Politicians and government officials, on the other hand, are rather more known for lying and simultaneously less afraid of the repercussions (a situation I hope you and I find some common ground in deploring--government ought to be afraid of the people).

This is, in short, something I suspect you just haven't thought through--anything you can say about DiGenova in terms of his ethical situation or the pragmatics of his action we can also obviously say about reporters writing their stories.

jmotivator said:

In fact, the fact that the source IS Joe DiGenova really makes my point. Since DiGenova has made the claim in person, each one of us can determine from what we know of DiGenova whether or not to trust his claim. We can evaluate the story based on the source's history.

On the other hand, when the source is anonymous, we have no idea how to evaluate the veracity of their claim.

Click to expand...

At this point, I've already responded to everything you say here. I hope you'll take the time to go back through my posts more carefully and try to understand the point I'm making.

In the meantime, let me make a claim that I suspect may also surprise you. I agree with the general right-wing view that mainstream news sources are grinding their own axes and pushing a divisive agenda aimed largely at conservatives. Of course, right-wing news sources are doing the same thing from the opposite side. I think people on both sides find it very difficult to recognize they're doing so, but I definitely see why a conservative might find CNN's programming downright insulting, and I think they really should stop.

In this case, however, I don't see how those sorts of issues come into play. It really is a simple matter of this: if you dismiss a source because it's anonymous, that flows all the way through no matter how many layers there are in between the anonymous source and the news story. If the problem with a typical NY Times anonymous source article is that the reporter writing the story might either be deceived, or might have an ulterior agenda, that problem applies also to DiGenova, and indeed only multiplies with the reporter writing the story with DiGenova as a source.

ashurbanipal said:

Well...surely everyone, or at least everyone who is reasonable, has at least some fear of the repercussions of being wrong.

Click to expand...

Not really, look at the lengths that the press goes to to protect anonymous sources who are wrong. The repercussions are for leaking in the first place, not for being wrong.

And when a source is anonymous we also have no way of telling if the source for Media outlet A and the source for Media Outlet B are actually different people... this leaves people predisposed to the story narrative to see the two stories as corroboration when in reality it could be the same person. This actually happened to the FBI with regard to the Steele Dossier. The reason Steele was fired was because he continued to the leak the details of the dossier after being told not to, and the FBI used a Yahoo news report to corroborate the dossier... when the source for the Yahoo story, it turned out, was Steele.

So the story is that the FBI agents and DOJ staff who worked on the two investigations want their day, but don't want to have to leak to do it. That is the story, and you have a source for that story.