Response to article about the anonymous smear of the 2008 presidential race.

While I was going over the San Jose Mercury News searching for ethical dimensions, I came across an article about a discredited article regarding the presidential campaign. (The discredited article is on this web site called "Insight"). The article that I read in the newspaper that talks about that, if you want to look at it is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/29/us/politics/29media.html?bl=&ei=5087%0A&en=51e1677efef21c5a&ex=1170306000&pagewanted=print

In the article, the reporter discussed how the editor of Insight web site, Jeffrey Kuhner, published an anonymous smear by anonymous reporters with anonymous sources.

After taking journalism classes, I learned that in the profession it is important to credit your sources and to know what you're talking about. What striked me the most after I read this article is that I didn't even think that there would be such an issue knowing that professional journalists should already know what to do/what not to do.

This also caused controversy in the news media because it mentions that commentators and TV hosts had actually picked up the web site's discredited article and cited information that they didn't even know was accurate or not.

Another interesting thing I discovered is that they mention how the Insight web site doesn't use bylines because they want to encourage other reporters to contribute when they can't write anything they know under their own names for fear of editors' biases and such. Also, it mentions that the web site has limited budget and aren't able to send correspondents to confirm all the facts of a story. My question is: is this even possible???

Personally, I think that this web site's anonymity and writing reports using anonymous sources with no byline is ethically wrong. I don't think it's professional at all and I was surprised to find that that such a dilemma has come about.

Other questions I thought about for future cases like these....

1. Can editors/journalists decide whether or not to keep their sources anonymous, even if the source(s) had already agreed to be named?

2. When commentators and TV hosts, or other journalists plan to cite information from other articles, are they normally required to confirm all the information given, even if the article they cite has already been published? Or do they just assume that since the article was published, the information in it is accurate?