Yeah, that is true. What I meant was there's nothing outragious about relying heavily on anonymous sources. Not to speak for SP, but I would say their purpose in what they're doing is not quite the same as the media during Watergate playing a central role in bringing down an administration. I'm not sure that "good professional reporters" would be better than SP at producing news content about the modern poker world, which is a unique environment. It's easy to be a big fan of SP because the major media outlets I go to for other news don't really deliver updates on the online poker situation in great detail. IMO it is quality content despite not having quotes and excerpts from documents.

My qualms about S:P are not so much that it relies heavily on anonymous sources, but that for some key stories it relies upon them exclusively.

I agree with you that S:P has several advantages over most professional reporters in reporting on this particular case. They have both poker knowledge and contacts that few, if any, professional reporters have.

One of the reasons for attributable quotes is that they more easily allow the reader to make more informed judgements about the quality and reliability of the reporting.

In another recent post, Noah convinced me that my expectations for standards of professional behaviour in US news media were higher than current reality. His operation may be closer to the current norm than I had thought. This seems to me to represent a decline in quality over the past few decades. I still think standards are higher in major news organizations in Canada than what Noah described as normal in the US, although they may have also declined somewhat here too.

My qualms about S:P are not so much that it relies heavily on anonymous sources, but that for some key stories it relies upon them exclusively.

The alternative is no story whatsoever. I'm okay with this "lowering of journalistic standards".

My take is that as long as

1) I believe the journalist is honest and
2) He's willing to produce the sources in a court of law should he be required to

Then everything is okay.

So Subject Poker was wrong and this thread is pointless? :-(

If S:P is usually right, read their articles. Sometimes you just run bad.

Do you believe Diamond Flush or Tapie? Who has a vested interest to misrepresent the truth?

Journalists can be honest and stupid, honest and misinformed, honest with poor judgement, honest but not knowledgeable about the subject matter, honest and competent but still mistaken.

I think DF and Noah are honest, intelligent, and knowledgable about much of the subject matter.

I have had occasional cause to wonder about their judgement, but I still put it well ahead of the average NVG poster.

I don't think we have a large enough sample size to detemine their accuracy rate.

With their degree of reliance on only anonymous sources, and the resulting failure to describe how they know they are not being manipulated, it is hard to get a good read on how likely it is that they have been misled.

No story whatsoever is better than a wrong story. No story is not much better then a story where you are left with "Trust us - have we ever lied to you before?" as your only way of evaluating its probable accuracy.

I'm sorry to sound so negative. I really admire what they have been able to come up with. I rely on their reports more than any other news source. In the "who do we believe - Tapie or S:P?" question, I'm inclined to believe S:P is at least partly right, and Tapie's lawyer is - how shall I put this? - choosing his words with great care. I'd just like more, and by "more" I don't necessarily mean more stories.

I don't bother to criticize the dreck put out by other sites. What's the point? S:P OTOH has potential to be even better than they are now.

As I do not know who DF might be I have no idea of his or her vested interest. I suspect neither do you.

SP are normally correct, but it’s looking increasingly less likely that they are in this case, when you consider that GPT have just outed a bunch of pros for refusing to pay there debts it seems unlikely he would be sticking up for CF if he was well really trying to get back the 14mil.

I believe that Ferguson and his lawyer backtracked when the SP article came out. Notice the delay between the article being published and Tapie's statement saying it was false.

How did they backtrack?

Noah discussed the matter on Pokercast. They simply gave up their claim to the money.

That makes sense

1 time?