Your post and the link sound very much like what Lakoff would call an idealized cognitive model or Gilles Fauconnier would call a frame.

Now the question is whether journalists are by and large paid to write to the frame. Given the overwhelming urges towards risk aversion in corporate and academic domains, I would bet this is part of the script: write what is already known to sell. It has the advantage of preserving expertise -- starting over with a new narrative, like Savage did, might lead to a Pulitzer for the exceptional person, but it might lead to decreased sales, so we need to fire Donahue, Maher, and the rest, until someone proves that we can win that way.

Control the narrative and you control the press. Control the press and you get Democrats who are not up for re-election to worry about being McGovern revisited. Control the history and nobody will realize why McGovern was the candidate in the first place. Control the election...

Someone might have already posted something similar, but Stengel just responded to my email threatening to cancel my subsrciption if a correction wasn't made, thus:

Thank you for your email, I appreciate your comments.

TIME Columnist Joe Klein made a reporting error, which he swiftly addressed in his blog postings on TIME.com. In addition, TIME will run a correction in his column in this week's issue of the magazine.

Thank you very much,

Richard Stengel

Managing Editor

TIME

If source protection is considered as a contract, i.e. for an anonymous source to provide newsworthy information to a journalist when some reasonable factor motivates that anonymity, then the contract depends on that source at least providing the information in good faith - even if they are wrong, to believe it is correct information.

On the other hand, if the journalist or journalistic organization finds compelling evidence that the source delivered the information in bad faith and with deceptive intent (and the journalist has a duty to investigate the source's information), that should be considered a thorough breach and repudiation of whatever contract there was - and it should release the journalist to investigate and report on that would-be source without any further special consideration.

Of course, there's also another compelling way to look at this: source protection is more than just a contract between two private parties. Though federal law doesn't recognize it, there is a journalist's privilege called into account here, akin to attorney-client privilege or doctor-patient privilege. I believe the First Amendment, and even more profoundly, the fundamental nature of democracy, necessitate this journalist's privilege.

But the anonymous source is not the primary beneficiary of this privilege. The recognized privileges exist to give the beneficiary of the privilege, e.g. the client or patient, freedom to draw on the advice and counsel of the privileged counselor, e.g. the attorney or doctor, because we recognize these as areas in which there is a compelling, fundamental need for the privileged beneficiary to be able to receive information freely from such a privileged counselor. Expert legal advice or expert medical advice, applied to the specific situation of the privileged beneficiary, are services that are so fundamentally needed to meet the basic needs of a human individual, that we protect that individual's right to receive such counseling, even when such a privilege otherwise might interfere with prosecution of a past crime, for instance.

For the journalist's privilege, the true privileged beneficiary is the public at large, especially in its collective role as the sovereign body of a democratic government. The journalist's duty is to provide that public at large with the expert information it fundamentally needs as a basic prerequisite to performing its functions as the collectively sovereign power in the democratic government.

This should be seen then as a journalist-democratic public privilege, in which the journalist is the privileged counselor, and the democratic body of the public at large is the privileged beneficiary that has a fundamental need for the expertly applied counsel that only the journalists can deliver.

This journalist-democratic public privilege is different from other privileges in that the communications between the beneficiary and the counselor in the privileged relationship are not secret, but it still parallels the other privileges in that it invokes both: (1) a compelling duty of a counselor to provide information to a beneficiary that the beneficiary cannot reasonably obtain in any other way, and (2) a need for the privileged counselor to engage in secret communications to carry out that duty. Only, in this case it is the communications between the journalist-counselor and her sources that must sometimes be kept secret to protect the journalist's capability to carry out her duty to provide information to her client, the democratic public. But it is still the democratic public's fundamentally compelling need for that information that is the motivating rationale and source for the privilege protecting the secrecy of the communications between the journalist and her anonymous sources.

If anything, the democratically governing public's need to gain basic information about the circumstances affecting the course of the nation is even more compellingly fundamental than an individual's need for privileged legal advice. This rationale for a journalist's privilege isn't yet legally recognized, but it should be. It is a morally inevitable pillar of democracy.

From this perspective, an anonymous source should be fully protected under such a journalist-democratic public privilege - but as a necessary part of the journalist's role in providing needed information to the democratic body. The anonymous source is more like a consulting physician or a legal co-counsel, if compared to the situations behind doctor-patient or attorney-client privilege: they might play a necessary role in the doctor or attorney fulfilling her privilege-covered role in advising the privileged beneficiary - but such third parties are not themselves the privileged parties; and their place in the privilege certainly fails if they provide their third-party information with a bad-faith intent to sabotage the primary beneficiary of the privilege.

Similarly, journalists need to think about protecting their anonymous sources in this way - with a view to protecting the absolutely fundamental need of the democratic public, the primary beneficiary of their journalist's privilege, to receive accurate information about circumstances relevant to the nation and to the governing thereof. No privilege exists without a duty of care and due diligence on the part of the privileged counselor toward the privileged beneficiary; and no privilege is of unlimited scope when weighed against factors contrary to the rationale for the privilege, such as the commission of future crimes. And the privilege is the beneficiary's to exert against the counselor - the counselor cannot claim the benefit of the privilege against the beneficiary, such as to cover up the counselor's own negligence in carrying out his duty to the beneficiary, such as by providing inaccurate or even deceptive counsel to the beneficiary, in breach of the trust invested by the beneficiary in the privileged counselor.

So too, a journalist is completely misled if he tries to claim the benefit of an anonymity agreement, pursuant to his role as the public's journalist, to contradict the public's right to know, where the anonymity agreement is used to cover a bad faith provision of deceptive information. This betrays the journalist's duty of care and due diligence to his client, the democratically sovereign public, and contradicts the privilege extended from the democratic public to the journalist.