Let us contemplate some wisdom from a media ethics expert quoted by The New York Times this week:

"To most journalists, the notion of anonymous reporters relying on anonymous sources is a red flag. 'If you want to talk about a business model that is designed to manufacture mischief in large volume, that would be it,' said Ralph Whitehead Jr., a professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts."

No, he wasn't talking about the Associated Press' (and the Washington Post's and the Los Angeles Times' and the New York Times') anonymous stringers relying on unnamed and unreliable sources reporting (or rather, rumor-mongering) on the war in Iraq.

No, he wasn't talking about the anonymous reporter identified only as "an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Najaf" in three stories just this week, which quoted various unnamed Iraqi clerics, residents and officials.

No, Professor Whitehead was talking about the swiftly and widely discredited InsightMag.com story about Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., attending a madrassa as a child. Fox News Channel (for which I am a contributor -- see, transparency's not so hard) took a pounding for picking up the inaccurate story. The liberal media pile-on continues despite the network's immediate acknowledgement of error in repeating the false charges and despite the fact that Fox didn't originate the story.

Unlike, say, CBS News, Dan Rather and the faked National Guard memos.

Meanwhile, CBS News has another potential controversy on its hands involving unnamed sources that Professor Whitehead and The New York Times won't get around to flogging. Continued...