Much ado has been made this week about an anonymous op-ed piece that appeared a few days ago in the New York Times. The article was supposedly written by a top official in the Trump Administration and was quite critical of the President.
We frankly do not understand why so much attention is being paid to it.
Even if it actually was written by a real person working in the White House, we wouldn’t have given it the time of day since the writer wanted to remain anonymous. The anonymity factor creates a big problem in the minds of readers who can legitimately wonder whether or not the article is genuine – was there a real author, or was it a fabrication of the publication?
Such fake news has happened before, with the New York Times and other major news outlets.
In 2003, the top two news executives at the Times, Executive Editor Howard Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd, resigned amid a scandal involving fabricated articles that appeared in the newspaper.
Remember the dismissal of anchor Dan Rather from CBS Evening News in 2004? He fabricated a story critical of President George W. Bush’s military service in the Texas Air National Guard that was aired during the presidential campaign with John Kerry.
And how about the lie NBC Nightly News Anchor Brian Williams told about coming under fire during his coverage of the Iraq War? He was dismissed in 2015 for it.
We could go on and on, but the point is that such fabrications have occurred in the past, and that is why responsible news agencies, including the Marysville Journal-Tribune, demand authenticity when publishing articles. This is especially important when printing articles written by a third person, as was the case with the recent op-ed in the Times.
After discussions with the Journal-Tribune Reader Advisory Board, the newspaper will now publish an editorial page policy each week. That policy states, in part, that no anonymous letters to the editor will be printed, nor will those that want the author’s name omitted from publication. In addition, the J-T greatly restricts the use of Associated Press articles that use anonymous sources for their information.
The New York Times should be ashamed of itself for what it did. In this era of fake news accusations, some of which are justified, it just added fuel to the fire. It’s no secret that the Times is in serious financial trouble, but it shouldn’t stoop this low just to gain readership when by doing so it violates longstanding ethical newspaper standards.