North Korea turned over key nuclear weapons documents to a visiting U.S. diplomat on Thursday. The North handed over the documents at the capital of Pyongyang and the diplomat is to carry them to South Korea later this week.The senior State Department official who leaked the story asked for anonymity so he could describe the outcome of the confidential meetings between U.S. envoy Sung Kim and the government of Kim Jong II.
The documents are supposedly detailed technological logs from North Korea's shuttered plutonium reactor.
The State Department official said, "They are an important element in the verification of a declaration which will include figures for the amount of plutonium they have produced."
What I could not believe when reading this story was that the Associated Press would let this official remain anonymous. This is a huge piece of information and I think that the AP should have searched harder for a source that they could actually name. What if this information is incorrect? What are the sources intentions in leaking this information? These are the questions that should have ran through the AP reporter's head when writing it.
Furthermore, why did CBS News run this story on their website? Stories that run with anonymous sources usually cause skepticism and CBS should have waited until a credible source could be identified before running it. We all saw what happened when Dan Rather ran a story about President George W. Bush's military service that turned out to be untrue, so CBS should have the common sense to be extra careful.
For more information and to read the full article, go to http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/05/08/world/main4080396.shtml
No comments:
Post a Comment