We should all take Mr. Greenwald's article with a grain fo salt.

Sources close to Mr. Greenwald's office have claimed that the FBI is investigating his links to organized crime and his name has been linked to a bribery scandal involving many top level Democrats.

Exactly how many Dems Mr. Greenwald has allegedly bribed and the exact amount he paid them remains to be seen.

How do I know all this?

Uh, it was from an anonymous source! I swear!

Make anonymous sources illegal except in extreme cirumstances.

Otherwise "journalists" will just keep cranking out made up stories and attributing them to "anonymous sources."

Aside from laziness or the desire to eliminate accountability, why would any of the sources that Klein used in his piece need to be anonymous?

..if literally everything Republican operatives have said about everything hadn't proved to be a lie.

There's a limit to how much credulousness one can forgive before suspecting complicity.

Thanks, Anonymous. I called and got an answer on the first ring, "Mr. Stengel's office."

I encouraged him to accept Mr. Greenwald's request for an interview. The woman on the phone sounded surprised to be getting such a call and said she'd pass it along.

Nothing. They are not a real party. They accept their characterizations in the media for now and will wait their turn for when Hillary is crowned.

In fact, I bet if Glenn asked Pelosi for a comment on this she would be just as nervous and as flumoxed as Time appears to be. Then she would have to pretend that she is part of a real oppossition. Klein was writing a narrative- a script- for the two party fraud. The likes of Klein are crucial in giving the appearence that the two fraud parties really have "differences". He mimics the appearence of "debate" between them with broad unthinking narritives like - "The Dems are soft on national security and have an image problem in that area." He doesn't have to think about what he writes much at all.

And this isn't really bias for the GOP. It is an overall bias toward power in general- Beltway power. The two party fraud is a mimic of debate. The Dems don't care about how they were represented in the Time story. That is their script written role for now. They wouldn't have objected to it.

As a non-American who is exposed to as much American media as an American, for me, this is not about politics or even journalism.

This is about running a lie to ground.

Yes, the current example speaks to politics and journalism, but more broadly, it speaks to the question of advocating for truth versus tolerating lies.

I presume that the for-profit media is not invulnerable from consumer-driven pressure. So it will be interesting to see whether, as some have predicted, Time Magazine (and Mr. Klein) simply weathers the storm...or whether a change in behavior can be forced. And by change, I don't mean Mr. Klein losing his job at Time; I mean a full and clear retraction/correction and avoidance of similar incidents in the future.

That said, I fear it may take broader coordination (than, say, the readers of salon and firedoglake) to achieve real change in this regard - it will take collective behaviour on a grander scale. However, it seems to me such a thing is possible...

Just wanted to say that.

Obviously the people at Time magazine are either willfully trying to bend the U.S. toward a fascist state (this is supported by their line up of NeoCon punditry), or ....

No, there seems to be no alternative.

1. I, too, have called Richard Stengel's office (212 522 1212) and I, too reached a friendly and polite woman (I, too, don't expect to get a return phone call.).

2. There seems to be a presumption on many posters's part that Klein was somehow acting in good faith when he wrote up his column (i.e., he was lied to and he believed his source(s)). Quite frankly, I have a hard time believing that he was acting in good faith; I think he planned this hatchet job on the theory that the vast majority of readers will not pay much -- if any -- attention to the reaction of the blogosphere.

Except, as I suggested earlier, that they are not disinterested on the subject of telecom immunity. Also, being indefensibly wrong does tend to make people snippy.

Painton was a visiting lecturer in the English department at Mount Holyoke College in the Fall of 2006.

If she won't talk to Glen or Jane, I wonder if former National Security Advisor, Anthony Lake (a Mount Holyoke professor) might be persuaded to give her a call and ask her to explain the failure to correct Klein's and Time's libel that Pelosi and other House Democrats are backing a bill that "would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court."

Or, maybe she was also too busy figuring out her “act two”.

It seems Painter is leaving Time, effective at the end of the year:

From Gawker:

http://gawker.com/news/the-revolving-door/time-deputy-me-

priscilla-painton-quits-311565.php

And from the Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/priscilla-painton

Or, maybe she’s just fed up with what’s been going on at Time. In any case, maybe this facet (her status at Time) should be part of what you’re working on.

P.S. I had to put the first link on two lines because Salon's

ads truncated the link as an unbroken chain.

"Make it illegal to attribute anything to an anonymous source and suddenly all these problems go away."

-- chris49068

I think anonymous sources are an important way to get hard to find information so I don't agree with it being illegal. What the law should do, however, is make it mandatory to reveal anonymous sources when their information is proven to be misleading or false. Or, it could penalize reporters or publishers who publish anonymous information that turns out false. . . Maybe you do both.

They should create a huge penalty for the publishers and journalists who print false anonymous info but provide that they can avoid it by publishing a correction that reveals the source.