Going Deep on the Deep-Six
7th November 2022
On Friday NBC’s Today show reported a story bearing on the assault on Paul Pelosi. Within a few hours the network deep-sixed the story with the comment that “it did not meet NBC News reporting standards.” We posted the memory-holed story via Twitter and noted NBC’s retraction here.
How did the story fail NBC News reporting standards? They didn’t say.
The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi spoke to “people at the network.” He mocks anyone who reiterated the story despite NBC’s mysterious “retraction.” Farhi’s story ran under the headline “NBC retracts erroneous Paul Pelosi story that fueled conspiracy theories.” Subhead: “People at the network said the ‘Today’ show report was based on ‘unreliable’ information from a source who was unnamed in the story.”
Note that Farhi’s sources (assuming they are plural as he says) remain unnamed in his story.
If NBC didn’t publish stories with ‘unnamed sources’ they wouldn’t have anything to publish.