An Unacceptable Headline Atop a Questionable Article

It's hard to know where to start with the lead article in Monday's Times. In it, anonymous government sources â€" described in the vaguest possible way (for example, “one United States official”) â€" are unquestioningly allowed to play their favorite press-bashing hand, featuring the national security card. In so doing, they seem to take a swipe at a news organization that competes with The Times.

But since The Huffington Post's energetic media reporter Michael Calderone has already written two well-reported posts on the “odd” article itself, and Greg Mitchell wrote about it Tuesday in The Nation, let's limit ourselves here to its jarring set of headlines.

After all, I'm on the record, repeatedly and perhaps tiresomely, about: 1) the overuse of anonymous sources; 2) setting the bar too low for agreeing to government requests to withhold information (despite some recent encouraging signs to the contrary); 3) the tendency to treat non-Times journalistic efforts with a lack of respect.

So, starting at the top, here is the main headline, in the upper-right corner of The Times, which is probably the most prominent position in world media: “Qaeda Plot Leak Has Undermined U.S. Intelligence.”

One might ask: Says who? Well, failing the presence of any attribution, one can only conclude that it's The Times itself making this interesting statement.

Surely the subheadlines (in the print edition) will address that problem? Well, no. “Militants Alter Tactic,” says the first. And the best of all: “Disclosure Caused More Damage Than Vast Snowden Trove.” Not a shred of attribution among the three â€" just straight from the mouths of anonymous government sources into the automatic credibility conferred by the paper of record's front page. The headline on the inside page echoes those on the front.

Patrick LaForge, who oversees the copy desk operations at The Times, where headlines are written, agreed that the headline was unacceptable when I asked him about it on Tuesday. (I had heard from a number of readers who were critical of both the article and the headline.)

He wrote in an e-mail:

The headline was not up to our standards. It should have better reflected the attribution or qualifications in the story. We've discussed this with the copy desk supervisors and other editors who were involved.

Sometimes our editing safeguards fail us under the press of deadline, as they did here. It is good to be reminded that our readers expect better. I am sorry we disappointed them.

I appreciate the tone of Mr. LaForge's response, which is oriented toward improvement rather than defensiveness.

That's a good start in addressing the problems of this article, its sourcing and its placement.

Updated, 3:58 p.m. | William B. Hamilton, the Washington bureau's editor for national security stories, told me Thursday afternoon that The Times did not mean the Monday article to be a swipe at another news organization.

“We certainly didn't intend it to blame McClatchy in any way,” he said, noting that The Times also published the names of the two Al Qaeda leaders whose messages were intercepted. (It did so only after McClatchy's story made the names public.)

He also said that many of the critics of the story “are missing part of the news here â€" that Snowden has not given away the store” in terms of harming national security or counterterrorism efforts.

The article, Mr. Hamilton said, “told an important and surprising story given the focus on Edward Snowden and the N.S.A. leaks. It had the kind of detail about terrorist operations that only reporters with long experience in national security coverage â€" and sources they can trust â€" can uncover.”

Mr. Hamilton made the point in an e-mail that anonymous sources are a necessary part of national security reporting. That's even more the case now that government investigations of leaks have chilled sources' willingness to talk to reporters, he said. The alternative, he said, was not to write some important national security stories at all.

“It is simply unrealistic in this age of leak investigations to expect us to gather news on sensitive subjects like intelligence and military operations without their use,” he said.

I also spoke with the Washington reporter Eric Schmitt, who echoed much of what Mr. Hamilton said, but added that The Times needs to “be vigilant in explaining to readers as clearly as we can who these sources are and what their motivations are.”

“We owe it to our readers” to provide that kind of explanation and context, Mr. Schmitt said.