"Now, NPR has not corroborated this reporting, and Buzzfeed credits the information to two unnamed sources who are said to be involved in the investigation."
The above quote, from NPR, sums up one of the key problems with journalism in America today. News organizations are too often not verifying what they report, just repeating what someone else reported.
What Buzzfeed reported from a single source who cited two other unnamed sources was this: Michael Cohen reportedly said President Trump told him to lie to Congress about the purported Trump Tower in Moscow.
Did Michael Cohen really say this? That's the question every news organization should ask themselves when they find out someone else reported the news. Another question for news organizations: Is it true, or is it gossip, or is it someone with an ax to grind? This is an age old question news organizations always confront. To deal with it, journalistic standards were developed to try to ensure what they report is correct. That standard is to try to verify, from two sources, the information. That is the standard used by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. On rare occasions, we and other news organizations may use a single source, but only if they have used that single source in the past and that source has always been accurate.
So what happened here is that NPR did not verify the information from the two unnamed sources. In fact, it doesn't even look like Buzzfeed verified the two unnamed sources--they were just going on a single source who cited two unnamed sources. We're not sure of the exact definition of gossip, but reporting that someone else reported something based on what one other person told them who cited two unnamed sources.... well, that sounds like a lot like hearsay.
NPR is free, and you're really not paying them anything to get news. But subscribers pay our newspaper, and we feel like we owe an obligation to our readers to report only those things that we have verified. We often do rely on The Associated Press, but we know its standard is to report things only after it has two sources. We don't know what Buzzfeed's standards are, but judging by this story, we sure wouldn't want to rely on that site to getyou news.
This is probably one reason the media's credibility with the public has declined in recent years. It's simply not good enough just to repeat what other news organization report unless you know they have verified it with two reliable sources.
Hopefully over time news consumers will rely primarily on those news organizations who use time-tested journalistic standards to report the news.
Editorial on 01/19/2019