Journalism, Ethics, and Lawrence O'Donnell

One night on his MSNBC show, Lawrence O'Donnell rather suddenly disclosed something a source had said to him.

This was, he said, only a single source, whose name he could not disclose, and there was no confirmation of the statement, but he was going to tell us, anyway.

Loan documents from Deutsche Bank, which has had complicated relations with the Trump family business, indicate (according to this unverified source) that there were loans made to Trumpworld on the basis of documentation with co-signers. And that the co-signers were "Russian oligarchs."

O'Donnell later apologized for telling us this. I have just re-told it, in the course of saying (as I am about to) that O'Donnell was wrong. But he was working as a representative of a news oriented cable network, as a company man on the job. I'm blogging and on my own time. So I am for the moment free of the sort of responsibilities he violated.

Trumpets have seized on the apology as a vindication. Since O'Donnell should not have told us about this source, it follows that there is no such source, or the source was lying, or ... something.

Well ... no. What it tells us is that O'Donnell screwed up. MSNBC has rules -- analogous to the rules of essentially every news organization. One anonymous source is NEVER enough to run with a story. Why? Well, because as a general rule-of-thumb requiring two sources helps protect the publishing/broadcasting organization from tort liability. Even public figures (like, say, Carol Burnett) sometimes win libel suits against those who forget that rule.

O'Donnell's offense, then, was not so far as I know against Trump or the Trumps collectively but against his employer. Since they haven't fired him, I'm not going to get too worked up on their behalf.

Meanwhile there is the possibility that his source was onto something. Let's hope that better information on point shows up.

Comments

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

The Lyrics of "Live Like You Were Dying"

Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog