News Weekly

So John Cole has pretty much addressed this, but last week Jonathan Chait criticized me and others for referring to Jeffrey Rosen's piece on Sonia Sotomayor as "gossip".

"Gossip" is an effective label for those who wish to denigrate Rosen's reporting or the reputation of TNR, but it's an inaccurate one. Gossip is unverified information. Gossip is something you hear all the time--say, Senator X mistreats his staff. No serious publication can pass off gossip as reporting. However, if you actually speak with the principals firsthand--you interview staffers for Senator X who report that he mistreats them--then what you have is reporting. That's what Jeff did. He spoke first-hand with several of Sotomayor's former clerks, who provided a mixed picture. Unsurprisingly, they declined to put their names on the record, but that's utterly standard for people who are speaking in unflattering terms about people they worked with or for.

Chait is one of my favorite writers on the interwebs, but this is less than persuasive. A big publication printing gossip doesn't change the definition of gossip. The issue isn't that the information was "unverified" as in, no one told Rosen these things, it's that it was objectively unverifiable, as in, assertions about Sotomayor's intelligence are unprovable. Rosen, as a well-respected legal expert, could have made that argument himself in some form, but he didn't, possibly because he wanted to present it as an "unbiased" observation. But since the source is anonymous, there's no way to judge the individual's motivations or perspective. There's reason to give people anonymity under certain circumstances to relay unpleasant information about a colleague or a superior, but not when that information can't be verified. Anonymous, unverifiable information is gossip.

Most oddly, Chait suggests I, along with others have some sort of agenda against the New Republic. I can only speak for myself, but in my many posts on Sotomayor and Rosen, I didn't say anything about the New Republic except that to identify the publication Rosen had been writing in.?

-- A. Serwer

Despite enormous gains in the last few months, Obama has failed to move the right track-wrong track numbers into positive territory. And in the last few weeks, the wrong track has risen (and his favorability and job approval rates have begun to come down to earth).

Favorable graph after the jump:

The Great Dr. Robert Shapiro will be on CNBC tomorrow, giving you the rundown on Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's trip to China.  Tune in at 11:10 a.m. ET, when he'll be a guest on "The Call."

If you'd like to bone up beforehand, check out the speech Secretary Geithner gave today at Peking University (or "BeiDa," to we alums).  

So John Cole has pretty much addressed this, but last week Jonathan Chait criticized me and others for referring to Jeffrey Rosen's piece on Sonia Sotomayor as "gossip".

"Gossip" is an effective label for those who wish to denigrate Rosen's reporting or the reputation of TNR, but it's an inaccurate one. Gossip is unverified information. Gossip is something you hear all the time--say, Senator X mistreats his staff. No serious publication can pass off gossip as reporting. However, if you actually speak with the principals firsthand--you interview staffers for Senator X who report that he mistreats them--then what you have is reporting. That's what Jeff did. He spoke first-hand with several of Sotomayor's former clerks, who provided a mixed picture. Unsurprisingly, they declined to put their names on the record, but that's utterly standard for people who are speaking in unflattering terms about people they worked with or for.

Chait is one of my favorite writers on the interwebs, but this is less than persuasive. A big publication printing gossip doesn't change the definition of gossip. The issue isn't that the information was "unverified" as in, no one told Rosen these things, it's that it was objectively unverifiable, as in, assertions about Sotomayor's intelligence are unprovable. Rosen, as a well-respected legal expert, could have made that argument himself in some form, but he didn't, possibly because he wanted to present it as an "unbiased" observation. But since the source is anonymous, there's no way to judge the individual's motivations or perspective. There's reason to give people anonymity under certain circumstances to relay unpleasant information about a colleague or a superior, but not when that information can't be verified. Anonymous, unverifiable information is gossip.

Most oddly, Chait suggests I, along with others have some sort of agenda against the New Republic. I can only speak for myself, but in my many posts on Sotomayor and Rosen, I didn't say anything about the New Republic except that to identify the publication Rosen had been writing in.?

-- A. Serwer