more scttwh

Thanks to scttwh, the Washington Post was fed misinformation that the Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (coincidentally "D") had never declared a state of emergency in LA.

Luckily, the Post ran a correction. However, Joshua Michah Marshall of Talking Points Memo gets his analysis right when he describes the deeper implications of this characteristic and problematic issue with the media's willingness to swallow and regurgitate the statements of "administration sources":

[F]or all the truly foolish chattering about anonymous sources and blind quotes a few months ago, this is a terrific example of the worst sort of anonymous sourcing. This claim by the administration official was obviously meant to place blame on Gov. Blanco. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that. Maybe she deserved blame. Reporters frequently have to rely on interested parties to bring key information to their attention.

But in this case, this is a straightforward factual assertion. What you do in such a case is find out whether it's true or not. If it is, you don't need to source it to your tipster. You run it as a fact. What you don't do is take an interested party's say-so on an easily verifiable claim and run it as a blind quote.