On Tue, 1 Apr 2008 WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
I have never suggested they "contact a source". What I have suggested is that you *may* contact a source *in order to* get them to re-publish a new statement. Contact alone is not sufficient.
Many times people will say "so and so emailed me", we've never held emails to be sufficient since they cannot be verified independently. The source has to actually publish something that can be independently verified.
But what *good* does it do to get the statement republished by a source? If the source does republish it, it's probably not going to do any sort of fact-checking beyond taking the guy's word that he saw traffic at the bridge and that his pictures aren't fake. It doesn't *help* us if our goal is anything other than "blind following of rules". All it accomplishes is it forces the editor to jump through a big hoop that's likely to fail for reasons totally unrelated to any fact-checking done by the source.