[Yang Yi] preserving anonymity is how you protect your source

Are you Yang Yi or someone close to him?

 

I am not a crook.

 

Never sell low. It's incumbent upon the Rockets to get decent value, which I think is impossible right now, and the worst thing that can happen is if the team takes back some bad contracts in order to get something done.

I just hope the drama cools off and Tracy realizes how close he is to screwing up the rest of his career.

 

Yang Yi sux.

 

Yaoterminator, did you translate that entire column? Great job and thanks.


Yang Yi writes, "Not every rumor is necessarily true, but not all rumors are fabricated." This is where I think the McGrady situation is at right now. There are too many stories on the tension to dismiss it entirely, but too many conflicting reports (and too few words from the involved parties themselves) to believe it all.

When emotions are involved, it's too easy misinterprete words that may have been spoken in stream of thought, with little real intent from the speaker. Which is why I try to be especially wary when anonymous sources talk about what they overheard regarding the Rockets.

 

or it is possible there is a person on the Rockets staff who hates TMAC yet has a good enough position that a reporter thinks him to be credible. Then he just makes crap up to get TMAC crapped upon.

 

your post is public at cn.nba.com

 

Thank you for your good translation.

 

Except why would a person on the Rocket staff hate T-mac? There are only a few reasons I can think of. These aren't just random clutchfans members

 

Sorry, I should have written "too few genuine words from the involved parties." I agree, at this point it's hard to believe Yao or McGrady when they publicly say everything's fine.

Right now, I take the players' words with a grain of salt, as much as I do with the words of anonymous sources. The truth is somewhere in there but it's hard to get at.

As for the quotes, I don't doubt that a player said "Let me flip a coin and let you know if I'm playing or not" (something like that) or an "extremely plugged-in person" said "Yao wants Tracy out." I don't think the reporters are making up these quotes; I believe someone did actually say these words.

However, I do question the context in which the words were said, or the interpretation provided by the sources.

And I try to be especially wary when reporters or columnists use the "trust me, I know what's going on" or "my sources tell me" card. Even when they turn out to be right, it strikes me as lazy reporting and ripe for abuse. If their sources told them something, I'd expect them to follow it up to the best of their abilities, and then report on it.

 

True or not, everyone has to be doing the same thing.

Waiting on Tmac...(to quote my favorite movie)


"Get busy living, or get busy dying."

DD

 

don't belive at all...

 

denniscd hates Carroll Dawson. He has portrayed CD as a human scum. And he is supposed to be an insider or close to some insiders. Do you believe CD is that bad? It is obvious that CD did something that REALLY pissed off denniscd or his source.

I don't know if this is something comparable to the T-Mac situation with "insider" information.

 

So basically everyone is lying but Yang Yi?

 

The writer of this piece apparently doesn't know much about journalism. Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate coverage didn't solely rely on Deep Throat for the source material but was highly corroborated. Deep Throat tipped them off and pointed them in the right direction but this wasn't a matter of Woodward and Bernstein just writing what he told them and then watching the fallout. They would've lost their jobs and rightly so if they had. done. Just in the past few years there have been a few scandals involving Dan Rather and the NY Times in the past few years regarding citing anonymous sources with little coroboration that have gotten the reporters in trouble. In a couple of cases the reporters where flat out fabricating the story and when it was shown they couldn't corroborate it they got canned.

So yes journalists will rely on anonymous sources and will seek to protect them but any good journalist will try to corroborate that with other information that isn't anonymous.

How this is matters to the current situation is that Yang seems to be saying "this is an anonymous source and since we know reporters like Bob Woodward have used anonymous sources we should trust these anonymous sources." Yes, good reporters who won Pulitzers have used anonymous sources but they also back up what those anonymous sources are saying with a whole lot of evidence. Just saying you have an anonymous source and that is what you are basing your story on though doesn't make it any more reliable without corroboration.

 

People will believe or not, it is a personal choice.

Annonymous sources are everywhere, the key is to look at the history of the journalist that is writing it.

David Aldridge is a very credible source, he is usually right, but believe what you want.

And you can not compare an investigative journalism piece like Watergate to the NBA, that is silly....one is an in depth investigation, the other is a race to get new info out as quickly as possible.

DD