What is not factual about that statement?

The better question is 'what's factual' as that's a random, unsourced rumor. Literally anyone can make those up and the vast majority are forgotten when they are eventually proven wrong. Yes, every so often one happens to be a real leak, but you're misinforming yourself if you treat them as credible in general.

When they do that, you should treat the people with the byline on the article as having said it themselves and then evaluate what evidence (if any) they can give for that and whether they have an ulterior motive (e.g. being a partisan hack).

Well said. Media which have been selling bullshit might be making some sort term profits - however are destroying their credibility and brand.

Anonymous sources have been a thing in journalism since, like, forever.

That's not actually a defense of the practice. To make it a defense, you would have to actually argue why a long history of yellow journalism means the public should believe anonymous rumors and to deal with arguments that even supposedly trustworthy papers have betrayed that trust, for example with the Jayson Blair scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair

What fraction of reporting would you say is faulty in this manner? If you think it’s a large number then you do not live in a fact-based world.

Why do you believe that facts are decided on the basis of anonymous rumors, rather than actual evidence? Trying to appeal to a bandwagon fallacy is not a great way to claim the high ground of rationality.

As I stated below,

>If a journalist cites an anonymous source that is more substantial than a random rumor that somebody just made up. Usually it is corroborated and the sources’ credibility is taken into account. >Just because you don’t like what the anonymous sources have to say doesn’t mean that it’s worthless.

Your premise is faulty, I don't accept any anonymous sources, including ones I agree with. In fact, I'm even more skeptical of them, not less. The fact that you have no way to verify it is what makes it worthless. You can't say "the source is reputable" because you don't know the anonymous source. Nor can you say "the journalist is credible" because they're not showing you their evidence.

This is a great way to let your bias do your thinking for you and I'll have no part of that. Why do I say it's your bias? Because you have literally nothing but your subjective judgement to base your opinion on in this case. After all, if you have something else, why are you trying to judge the reliability of a random, anonymous rumor in the first place?

The journalist may be credible because of a past history of credible reporting, as well as the organization that they are a part of. Both have a reputation they aim to uphold to report the truth.

Just because you are not in a position to independently verify every fact that gets reported doesn’t mean that it isn’t true. It’s ok to be skeptical, but you seem to be taking it to an extreme.

I never said it means it isn't true, I said ignore them. That means I don't use them to inform myself at all.

So you've misunderstood what I'm saying quite badly.

I base my views on those things that can be verified, not on all the stuff that cannot be. That said, I do not suffer from Gell-Mann amnesia. I'm under no delusion that most reporters are doing anything more high-minded than trying to be the first to summarize the next big story. Nor do I normally suppose that they are experts on most subjects, particularly those like law, technology or medicine, though they have hopefully summarized an actual expert to the best of their understanding. And yes, the precious few who actually are experts of some kind (e.g. Volokh) are given due credit in the realm of their expertise and generally the sort I favor reading.

I therefore tend to seek out actual, primary sources (the relevant scientific paper, actual legal scholars, the text of the actual law, etc.) and use those, rather than some reporter's rushed summary thereof, to inform myself on any matters of actual importance. So the reporters I find more credible are the ones who actually bother to link to these primary sources when they're available online.

That usually means reading more from people like, say, Volokh, Popehat or the SCOTUSblog and less of CNN. Yes, I know Chris Cuomo is an attorney, but he gets special demerits for getting the law wrong (and having gotten called on it by many lawyers with more experience).

So Woodward and Bernstein's reporting was worthless because you could not identify and seek out Mark Felt and ask him questions?

There are legitimate reasons to keep sources anonymous, especially as it pertains to criminal investigations. Journalists have legal protections that allow them to keep the identities of their sources private. I understand that it's suboptimal to appeal to authority and say that you should just trust Woodward and Bernstein on the matter, but that authority was hard-earned over a long period of time. It should not be discounted.

> So Woodward and Bernstein's reporting was worthless because you could not identify and seek out Mark Felt and ask him questions?

You're confusing what might be true with what's provable. The fact that they're anonymous rumors means they're unprovable for the public (but, importantly, not necessarily for the journalist who should be using them to dig up verifiable facts).

You're also ignoring that they uncovered many facts which could be verified, which one should pay attention to, while ignoring the unverifiable bits.

If you're going to bring up Watergate, don't forget the words "Trust, but verify." We're not able to do that last part. Therefore we ignore the rumors--that is, we neither believe them nor assume to be false.

Anything else is simply irrational. This sort of "reasoning" simply makes one gullible. You'll have nothing to fall back on but your own assumptions when the question of how you know which rumors can be trusted comes up.

What a myopic worldview

Here is an example of a factual statement that is also intellectually dishonest in a similar vein: "There were unsourced rumours from earlier that cycrutchfield assaults women. However, even arguing with them is rare nowadays for him."

The only assumptions I had made is that you rarely argue with women and that you don't assault them (or people in general, which let's pretend is true for the sake of the argument), everything is factual. See why this kind of framing is dishonest?

If a journalist cites an anonymous source that is more substantial than a random rumor that somebody just made up. Usually it is corroborated and the sources’ credibility is taken into account.

Just because you don’t like what the anonymous sources have to say doesn’t mean that it’s worthless.

Might have something to do with the fact that in the past few years, more than a few "journalists" from respected major publications got caught red-handed with citing sources that were later proven to be less than credible. Here is an example of that reported by Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/w...)

>Just because you don’t like what the anonymous sources have to say doesn’t mean that it’s worthless.

I tend to be suspicious of anonymous sources a lot of times even when they say what I like. That statement was just a baseless assumption about me on your part.

what percentage of journalists do you suppose make this mistake? Is your assumption that it is a widespread practice to invent sources to push some sort of agenda?