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Which of course.
But if you are a nerve of newspapers and suppliers – and I am! – there is something to gain in a) dig into the way the Times described the writer and b) understand the calculation of the Times in the publication of the piece.
The writer has been described by the Times as a "senior official of the Trump administration", which is obviously very very broad. There are thousands of people in the federal bureaucracy and God knows that everyone also thinks of being a senior official. (If there is anyone below you on the totem, it would be a junior official, then you could tell you that you are a senior government official. ;administration.)
"All I can say is that I think we are following a definition that has been used by our editorial staff in the past," Jim Dao, Times editor, said Thursday.
Where does this lead us? Almost nowhere. Except you must know about the New York Times: They do not publish an anonymous editorial of anybody in the Trump administration. In particular, they do not publish any that alleges a near-coup within the federal government among people worried that the president is not only desperately out of his depth, but that he does not really understand what he's really like.
In short: If a Trump administration bureaucrat arrives at the Times – or if an intermediary addresses the Times – to ask him to write an article like this without his name, the answer would be immediate "no." Contrary to what Trump says on his Twitter feed, media organizations are very wary of giving anyone and everyone the anonymity to launch attacks. Reporters push sources to put their names in quotation marks or at least to narrow the anonymous descriptions to show who these people are. (and why do they say what they say) as possible to the reader. Media organizations – at least those that are credible – are very reluctant to let people take pictures without their names being associated with them.
Given all this, it is said that the Times was willing to extend the veil of anonymity to this author – especially, again, because of the stakes and the target. This is not a decision taken lightly. That the decision was made to publish it should tell you that it is not a disgruntled high level middle manager who is buried in the bureaucracy. This is a real senior official. A name that most people who follow politics – and maybe some who do not – will recognize it. The Times just would not do what it did for a major figure in the Trump world.
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