Book Babes Explain "Serious Journalism"

In case you were wondering if there was any connection between the new books from Seymour Hersh and Kitty Kelley (not to mention the delightfully named James Naughtie), Book Babe Margo has the answer:

All of them rely on anonymous sources and hearsay to shore up shocking allegations against George W. Bush and/or members of his family and administration -- a practice that serious journalism has always rightly frowned upon.

Serious journalism, mind you, unlike that yellow hysteria Woodward and Bernstein were peddling in that notorious rag, the Washington Post. But Margo does actually have a valid point, as she wonders aloud why Kelley's the only one attacked by critics for using anonymous sources and hearsay. Is it because she's not a member of the Old Boys Club, in both the professional and gender-based sense of the term? Or is it because she writes about celebrities?

Then Ellen trots out the old "it's a sign of just how degraded our culture has become" argument, describing Kelley as the demonized source of the stories we all want to tell anyway. Margo agrees, then jumps right back on her hobbyhorse: "Be skeptical of ALL unnamed sources, and don't think just because you've expressed your skepticism that you can then repeat those suspect allegations with impunity." The point she never quite grasps, though, is that Hersh, along with many other users of unnamed sources, doesn't just rely on their information. "Serious journalism" involves legwork for the purposes of verification, and I think Sy Hersh had pretty much proved himself on that front long before he started writing about Abu Ghraib.

Anybody who's had the inner strength to read the Book Babes regularly, though, has seen their scorn for Bush critics before, along with their nonsense about Abu Ghraib. This latest dispatch seems to fall quite neatly into that pattern.