Unnamed source/smear

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Media commentary

Paul Adams

The Globe’s Michael Valpy is one of the most revered figures in Canadian journalism, and rightly so, but he slipped a bit below his own high standards today by quoting a “senior Liberal” dissing Dion in an article about a new Liberal puff-piece on their leader. This “source” added no information, just an acid quote, and evidently doesn’t have the guts to put his or her name to the jab. Could this “senior Liberal” be a supporter of one of the other leadership candidates, or an adviser no longer in the inner circle? Don’t look for any information in the article.

There’s a place for unnamed sources: when they put information before the public that is not obtainable any other way. And when we are told enough about the source make an evaluation of how seriously to take the information. But this is not what’s going on here.

Here’s the passage:

“But what it [the video] won’t show is the Stéphane Dion that many party members say they know: a man whose personality, as one senior Liberal put it this week, is far removed from the romantic abstraction – of the humble little engine that could – that won him the Liberal leadership. “He is absolutely the arrogant, stubborn know-it-all,” the Liberal said.”

Paul Adams, a former political reporter with the CBC and Globe and Mail, is a member of Carleton’s journalism faculty and executive director of EKOS Research Associates.