I'm making an effort not to be provoked into controversies started by disingenuous hacks and kept alive by idiots, and as such, I'm not going to say much about why the LA Times reported on the Rashid Khalidi using their preferred medium of "text" rather than broke faith with a source and handed the video cassette over to NetFlix. I will say, though, that this is standard operating procedure in the news business, which does not tend to release much in the way of primary documents. An example: Almost every story you read is the product of dozens of interviews, most of which never show up in the content of the article, and almost none of which are transcribed and made public on the magazine's web site. This is true for, among others, The LA Times and The National Review. Many of those interviews are conducted on background, or off-the-record, and though the reporter has the full file of her source's comments, the reader never knows of the source's involvement in the story. In those cases, the reporter is honoring the source's request to remain completely hidden. The National Review, which frequently uses anonymous sourcing, has zero credibility to demand that The LA Times release a video against the source's wishes. It is against not only The LA Times's expressed code of professional ethics, but also against The National Review's expressed code of professional ethics.
