Free Republic

Tuesday’s edition of PBS NewsHour featured a discussion about “the differences in the experiences of black journalists as contrasted with their colleagues.” One of the guests, Los Angeles Times Executive Editor Norman Pearlstine, talked about how “one of the active debates we had over the past week was about the use of the word ‘looting’ to describe the destruction of the property” that has taken place at several riots that have occurred in the wake of the death of George Floyd. Pearlstine went on to talk about how the seemingly innocent term is actually profoundly racist.--- Dorothy Tucker, the President...

NEW YORK -- An anonymous tip that nearly landed Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper in jail probably wasn't valuable enough to justify a promise of confidentiality, his editor said Tuesday. Speaking at a panel discussion in New York sponsored by Court TV, Norman Pearlstine, editor in chief of Time Inc., lamented that reporters covering Washington have become too quick to offer total anonymity in exchange for information. Confidentiality should be reserved for special circumstances, he said. "A 90-second conversation with the president's spin doctor, who was trying to undermine a whistle-blower, probably didn't deserve confidential source status," Pearlstine said.

Time Inc. editor in chief Norman Pearlstine, who made the controversial choice last summer to turn over the notes of a reporter threatened with jail for refusing to identify a source, is writing a book about anonymous sources. "Off the Record" is scheduled to be published by Nan A. Talese, an imprint of Doubleday, in 2007. In a decision that brought criticism from his peers in journalism, Pearlstine agreed to comply with a court order to turn over notes by Time reporter Matt Cooper. They were sought by a special federal prosecutor investigating who in the Bush administration leaked the...

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...The truth... is that this is a debacle that some in the press corps have brought down upon themselves.... Liberal editorial pages were among the loudest in demanding that a special counsel be appointed to find the leaker. And only many months later, when Ms. Miller was in the dock, did New York Times editorials finally get around to admitting that the leak might not even be a crime. Their partisan loathing for Mr. Bush caused these editors to overlook the risks even to their own reporting self-interest. They have also left the press more vulnerable than it was before....