By Margaret Sullivan, Media columnist, September 6<\/p>\n
Was the New York Times\u2019s decision to publish a mystery op-ed<\/a> piece describing an organized resistance inside the Trump administration \u201cgutless,\u201d as the president has angrily deemed it?<\/p>\n Or was it a crucial public service, as the Times\u2019s top opinion editors see it?<\/p>\n I\u2019d call it neither. What it was, however, was a quagmire of weirdness: fraught with issues of journalistic ethics and possibly even legal concerns.<\/p>\n [\u2018The sleeper cells have awoken\u2019: Trump and aides shaken by \u2018resistance\u2019 op-ed<\/a>]<\/i><\/p>\n And odd as it is, it could get weirder quickly, if New York Times reporters are the ones to break the news of which senior Trump administration official wrote it. (By rights, they ought to \u2014 after all, they do have the best potential tipsters on this story, and, handily, right in their own building.)<\/p>\n The decision to publish the piece wasn\u2019t unreasonable. And was probably almost irresistible, in this attention-grabbing age. I have no doubt that thoughtful editors, including Op-Ed Editor James Dao, vetted its authorship carefully, and considered it from all angles. I also have no doubt that part of the thinking was the knowledge of how stunning it would be \u2014 and was. Inside-the-Beltway heads are still exploding.<\/p>\n The piece has significant news value, as Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet suggested when he told BuzzFeed News that he viewed it as a \u201ccompelling piece of journalism.\u201d (That description may be a bit too kind \u2014 its turgid prose and self-aggrandizing thinking falls somewhat short of sparkling opinion writing. Seldom have so many cliches \u2014 \u201ccold comfort,\u201d \u201cadults in the room\u201d \u2014 been crammed into a mere 750 words.)<\/p>\n [These Trump officials have denied writing the Trump \u2018resistance\u2019 op-ed<\/a>]<\/i><\/p>\n But its core ideas have been understood for a long time, as the Times\u2019s Michael Schmidt noted on Twitter on Wednesday night, by quoting his father\u2019s apt question in a phone call to his ace-reporter son: \u201cDidn\u2019t we already know all of this?\u201d<\/p>\n And some of the thorny issues were broached by Walter Shaub, a former director of the federal Office of Government Ethics, mocking the Times institutional voice in a tweet<\/a>: \u201cWe now present an opinion piece with no substantive content by an anonymous contributor whom no employer should ever trust again.\u201d<\/p>\n ho the mystery writer was \u2014 for the very reason that he runs the reporting side of the Times\u2019s operation, which is famously separate from the opinion side.<\/p>\n [All the speculation that\u2019s fit to tweet: Who wrote that anonymous Times op-ed?<\/a>]<\/i><\/p>\n It does strain credulity just a bit to think that he really doesn\u2019t know at this point \u2014 a celebrated reporter himself, he is in constant contact with his boss, Times Publisher A.G. Sulzberger, and in frequent touch with top opinion editors including Editorial Page Editor James Bennet. (The paper\u2019s publisher is a member of the editorial board, and Bennet reports directly to him; Sulzberger surely was consulted.)<\/p>\n But what happens at that moment when Maggie Haberman or one of her colleagues nails down the name? Now that\u2019s a story that, in the newsroom vernacular, has to be \u201clawyered.\u201d<\/p>\n And I don\u2019t believe for a minute that it would be held back or spiked. It would run \u2014 and again, heads would explode.<\/p>\n Jonathan Peters of the University of Georgia School of Law (and the press-freedom correspondent of the Columbia Journalism Review) predicted that \u201cthis would be a messy case\u201d if one of the parties (the writer, presumably) decided to sue the paper for breaching confidentiality.<\/p>\n The First Amendment, he said, doesn\u2019t bar legal action against a media company whose journalists make and break a promise of confidentiality. Whether the wall between opinion and news would be legally recognized in such a case, though, isn\u2019t well-established.<\/p>\n That sort of suit seems unlikely, but we are fully in the weirdness zone, so you never know.<\/p>\n Political commentators of all stripes have made the point that the piece itself reeks of cowardice and, as some see it, of rank disloyalty rather than \u201csteady state\u201d patriotism.<\/p>\n