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Newsweek was playing with fire, says Time magazine

By Khalid Hasan

WASHINGTON: Time magazine, Newsweek’s rival, which has the larger circulation of the two, has accused its competitor of “playing with fire” by printing a story based on a single, uncorroborated source.

The newsmagazine writes in its current issue that Newsweek was “playing with fire by relying on a single, anonymous source to support such a provocative claim. In this case, the source was presuming to describe a still unpublished report that neither the Newsweek correspondent nor the source possessed. “You’re trying to predict what’s going to be in a document that hasn’t been written yet,” says Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. “If you have one source who says, I’m sitting in an office right now looking at the report, and then they read you the page, then I’d say, Can you fax it to me? Under those conditions I’d be willing to go with one source.”

However, Time conceded that despite the potential problems with anonymous sources, news organisations aren’t likely to stop using them anytime soon. There are too many people with essential information who are afraid to go public, sometimes out of fear of losing their jobs. “But many in the media, amid periodic waves of criticism, are re-examining how often to use unnamed sources. Some publications now are more aggressive about getting sources to agree to be identified. Some papers, including the Washington Post, routinely state in their stories why a source has declined to go on the record,” the report adds.

According to Time, Newsweek “compounded its mistakes” when the report who was filing the story, took it for confirmation and assumed he had confirmation when the Pentagon did not raise objections to the allegation. Time adds that Pentagon’s silence did not amount to confirmation, as assumed by the reporter. It recalls that during the Watergate, the only story the newspaper got wrong was when one of the two reporters, Carl Bernstein, told his informant that he would count to a certain number and if the source stayed on the phone, he would know that his story was correct. The source stayed on the phone but the story bounced.

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