Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, whose bombshell story about President Donald Trump last week has ignited untold outrage and furious denials by the White House, accepted the critique that his use of anonymous sources undermined the strength of his report.

Goldberg’s story, which relied on four anonymous sources — but has since been mostly confirmed by three other news organizations, including Fox News, rocked the political-media landscape with just two months left in the 2020 election. Its allegations about Trump’s callous, insulting language about veterans and selfish refusal to travel to honor WWI American war dead resulted in at least 10 current or former Trump White House officials denying the story. Trump himself tweeted an attack on Goldberg, calling him a “con man” and then singled out retired General John Kelly, who was included in one of the damaging anecdotes and who was the White House chief of staff at the time of the 2018 incident at the heart of The Atlantic story.

On Monday, Goldberg went on MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes to discuss the blockbuster piece and the raging debate about media ethics that has ensued. After a discussion about Trump’s long and fraught relationship with the military, which has including boasts that he is smarter than the Pentagon’s generals as well as numerous, public feuds with his former Defense Secretary, retired General James Mattis and former National Security Advisor, retired Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, Hayes zeroed in on the use of unnamed sources for such an  incendiary story.

“I want to talk about the sourcing here,” Hayes said. “And I obviously know there are anonymous sources you are protecting. But in a general sense, I had two reactions when I read the piece. One was” ‘Okay, why didn’t you tell us this before? And why not be on the record, whoever you are out there?’ I mean, this is — what you are saying here is very serious stuff. It is an incredible condemnation of the president’s character and just his humanity, obviously. What is your response to that?”

“It is interesting. And obviously I push. And obviously I know that other reporters who cover this area are pushing various people to say what’s on their minds,” Goldberg said, before offering some possible hints about the identify of some of his sources. “I think there is a couple of things. There is this idea of a code that, you know, you don’t interfere. I think people are torn. On one hand they don’t want to interfere in democratic electoral processes.”

“On the other hand, you are talking about a president who is unlike anything they have ever experienced,” Goldberg continued. “I think there is also fear. I think — and we see this across the board in Donald Trump’s Washington — there is a fear on a kind of a superficial level of a Twitter mob. There is also real fear of personal safety, fear for your family, fear for what you put everybody around you through if you started talking about this sort of thing.”

Notably, Cesar Sayoc, a die-hard Trump supporter, was sentenced to prison in 2019 for 20 years after he infamously mailed numerous pipe bombs to more than a dozen people and news organizations that he viewed as enemies of the president.

“These are people just like other people, and they have this anxiety,” Goldberg noted. “It is a reasonable question to ask why people who have had direct exposure to Donald Trump, who know what Donald Trump has said, who know what Donald Trump has done, won’t simply come out and say it. And I share that view that it’s not good enough. But, you know, like other reporters, I’m always balancing out the moral ambiguities and complications after anonymous sourcing with the public’s right to know.”

“‘The sources are not anonymous to me,’ [Fox News reporter] Jennifer Griffin said that from Fox News when she was challenged,” Goldberg pointed out. “I trust these sources. These are people in the various rooms. But, yeah, obviously it would be better if people would say — attach their names to what they know.”

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.

from Mediaite https://ift.tt/3bzHs49