Thanks to the great work of FReepers and bloggers (especially Powerline), it is just a matter of time before CBS News admits it relied on forged documents in its “scoop” about President Bush’s National Guard service.

Once CBS news executives acknowledge their error, they will have a tough decision to make: whether to name the people who supplied the fake documents to them.

Daniel Okrent of the New York Times argued a few months ago that news organizations have an obligation to name names when anonymous sources turn out to have lied:

The contract between a reporter and an unnamed source – the offer of information in return for anonymity – is properly a binding one. But I believe that a source who turns out to have lied has breached that contract, and can fairly be exposed. The victims of the lie are the paper’s readers, and the contract with them supersedes all others.

Former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, commenting on the use of anonymous sources in the reporting of the Wen Ho Lee case, made a similar argument

I believe that if a journalist is lied to by somebody they’re not obligated to protect them.

I agree with Okrent and (in this one case only!) Blumenthal. CBS will never remove the stain on its reputation from this fiasco, but it can partly redeem itself by divulging the identities of its sources. This is particularly important if, as reported here, the Democratic National Committee and Kerry campaign were somehow involved.

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