The Abany Times Union quotes Poynter’s Kelly McBride in a story about the paper’s role in exposing political wrongdoing:
“There’s nothing unusual about a reporter listening to a confidential source for story leads. Consider, for example, the role of the source known as Deep Throat in telling reporters for The Washington Post where to look for evidence of White House criminality during Watergate.
“Our tipster surely had a motive other than an aversion to the waste of taxpayer resources on state helicopter flights, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have acted upon the tip to seek information of value to our readers. Kelly McBride, who leads the ethics program at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, told an interviewer on WNYC radio Friday that what the Times Union had done was ‘the standard way of doing business in journalism,’ yielding ‘an incredibly valid story, journalistically.’ “
