From Howard Kurtz’s Washington Post media column: In the middle of a piece about how Daniel Okrent is doing as the NY Times’ reader rep (apparently, there’s some healthy friction between Okrent and editor Bill Keller), Kurtz writes:
In fact, says Keller, he has e-mailed readers to say he disagrees with Okrent’s e-mails. Okrent, for instance, faulted the Times for leading a story on Palestinians cooperating with Israel with an anecdote that admittedly “could not be corroborated” — about the blackmailing of a Palestinian lured into a sexual encounter. “I thought he was wrong,” Keller says. “I wrote him and the reader and the reporters explaining why I thought the story was legitimate.”
It would be interesting to know why Keller thought an non-corroborated quote of that nature is legitimate in a news story.
