The problem with Jennifer Griffin's claim that she 'confirmed' the Atlantic's sucker/loser story

I am not going to join President Trump in the demand that Fox News fire Jennifer Griffin for “confirming” the Atlantic’s story (or much of it anyway) about Trump supposedly insulting America’s war dead. I am also not going to dispute Brit Hume’s defense of Griffin that she is a good reporter who plays it straight.

But regardless of any of this, there is no way to credit her claim that she confirmed Jeffrey Goldberg’s story in the Atlantic with her own series of tweets this past weekend.

Understanding why requires us to consider the meaning of the word “confirm” in a journalistic context. Journalists do not and cannot confirm anything. Only credible sources can do that. Journalists don’t give the confirmation. They receive the confirmation and pass it along to the rest of us.

If I am covering city hall and I hear that the mayor is considering cutting the budget, I go to the mayor – or a member of his or her staff, or someone else who’s involved – and I ask that person to confirm what I heard. If they do, then I report to you what I was told and who told it to me. And if it came from someone in a position to know and willing to go on the record, I’ll tell you that this particular source confirmed the mayor’s plan to cut the budget.

But you can’t say “Dan Calabrese confirmed it” because Dan Calabrese can’t do that. I can only seek the confirmation from someone else.

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There are other things required of confirmation. In order for a viewer/reader/listener to credit a confirmation, we have to know who confirmed it. When Jeffrey Goldberg or Jennifer Griffin or any other journalist tells us they have a source who confirmed the information, but won’t tell us who the source is, the information is not confirmed. Why? Because we have no way of knowing if the person who purported to confirm it is knowledgeable or trustworthy.

It wasn’t long ago that journalism considered a named source more credible than an unnamed source, and for good reason. The named source can be identified by his or her position. We can make an assessment of that person’s access to good information. We can identify who that person works for and is associated with. And we can hold that person accountable for the accuracy of what he or she says.

Anonymous sources allow us to do none of that. When anonymous sources are the ones who offer us “confirmation,” we are left to trust the journalist who assures us that the source is really good. And that’s a problem. The trustworthiness of a particular journalist should not play a role in how we assess the information in a story. Only the reporting itself should do that. If the reporting is good enough that we can read what’s been said and assess that it’s credible for all the reasons I outlined above, the writer could be the least trustworthy person in the world and it wouldn’t matter.

I’m sure Jennifer Griffin is a very fine journalist, but she is still a journalist and not a party to the events that supposedly took place. She cannot confirm anything. And her anonymous sources can’t confirm anything either because we don’t know who they are or how they supposedly know it.

This is especially a problem because so many people who were there have gone on record – by name – and said emphatically that the president never said or did what Goldberg claims he said and did. This includes people who were on the trip and were with Trump the entire time. It even includes John Bolton, who can’t stand Trump and has written an entire book assailing Trump. You can dismiss, if you want, the accounts of some of the others because they still work for Trump and you think they’re just covering themselves. You can’t say that about Sarah Huckabee Sanders because she no longer works for the White House, but maybe you’ll dismiss her as a loyalist.

But you can’t say that about Bolton, who burned any and all bridges to Trump months ago. If he were to go on the record and confirm the claims Goldberg has made, it would surely earn him another round of talk show appearances and probably a fresh spike in book sales. Yet Bolton is emphatic: Trump never said it.

And even if you do want to dismiss the denials of so many White House officials on the grounds that they’re biased, at least we know who they are and they’ve told us how they’re in a position to know the president didn’t say the things he’s accused of saying. What do we know about the biases of Goldberg’s and Griffin’s anonymous sources? What do we know about how close they were to what happened? What do we know about the axes they may have to grind? What do we know about how close they were to Trump on the trip or how much time they spent with him?

We know nothing about any of this. We just have to take Goldberg’s and Griffin’s word that they are good sources. But why should we do that when they won’t tell us who they are?

Here is something we do know about anonymous sources, though: They are lying to someone. A person who gives you information, but asks that their name not be used because it will get them in trouble, is either betraying the reporter or betraying their boss. This is a person who is showing up for work every day and collecting a paycheck on the premise that he or she is working for Trump and helping him govern. Yet they are going behind Trump’s back and telling bad things about him to the news media.

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Now, you might defend this on two grounds: 1. Trump is terrible so there’s nothing wrong with betraying him. 2. They really work for the American people and therefore betraying Trump is actually a service to the public.

The problem with this is twofold: 1. Lying is still lying. Just because you don’t like the person who got betrayed doesn’t make it any less a betrayal. If they would lie to Trump, who’s to say they wouldn’t lie to you? Who’s to say they’re not lying to everyone? Liars do that. 2. Trump is the duly elected president chosen by the people, so when you presume to serve the people by betraying the president, you are actually undermining the choice the people made the last time they had the opportunity to pick a president.

Anonymous sources are untrustworthy by definition. The media these days regard the anonymous source as more credible than the named source because, they figure, the named source has to tow the party line, while the anonymous source is able to “speak freely.” But the anonymous source can also lie freely, and can do so without any accountability. There’s no way to test their statements because we don’t know who they are. To speak freely also means to lie with impunity.

So did Trump really call America’s war dead losers and suckers? At least 10 people who were there have gone on record, with their names, as saying he absolutely did not. A few people whose names and positions we don’t know say he did. And the journalists they said it to assure us that, even though we can’t assess the credibility of their sources, it’s OK because we can just trust them – the journalists.

I do not think so.