The New York Times needs to reign in its gossip mongering and anonymous sourcing.
So, Donnie Deutsch’s week-long test on MSNBC was canceled today. New York Times writer Brian Stelter, in a piece titled, “MSNBC Pulls the Plug on Donny Deutsch’s Weeklong Anchoring Stint” on his Media Decoder blog, writes,
A weeklong anchoring stint on MSNBC by Donny Deutsch ended abruptly on Wednesday, and four people briefed on the decision said the cancellation stemmed from an unflattering mention of that channel’s No. 1 anchor, Keith Olbermann, a day earlier.
Mr. Deutsch had labeled his hour on MSNBC “America the Angry,†and Mr. Olbermann was shown briefly in a series of clips of media bloviators during a segment that pondered what role the media plays in fomenting the public’s anger. The four people briefed on MSNBC’s decision said Mr. Olbermann’s anger about the segment prompted the cancellation of the weeklong “America the Angry†series.
Keith Olbermann, now a Twitter pro, decided to comment the best way he knew how. Via Twitter. (Read bottom to top.)
Also via Twitter, Stelter, leading up to the piece, wrote, “Big cable news story is brewing…” Then, later, called his piece, “A must-read.”
Really? Hubris.
I applaud Olbermann for his approach, and take Stelter to task for not abiding by The Times policy regarding anonymous sources, which the Times own Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, just this Sunday wrote about, again:
THE Times continues to hurt itself with readers by misusing anonymous sources.
Despite written ground rules to the contrary and promises by top editors to do better, The Times continues to use anonymous sources for information available elsewhere on the record. It allows unnamed people to provide quotes of marginal news value and to remain hidden with little real explanation of their motives, their reliability, or the reasons why they must be anonymous.
[A reader] said he realized it “can take something of a leap of faith for some readers to be comfortable†with anonymous sources in such articles. That leap would be easier if The Times did not squander readers’ trust by using unnamed sources so often and so casually in far less compelling cases.
I think why Donnie Deutch isn’t on MSNBC today falls into the “far less compelling cases” category, don’t you?