Thread by @davidfickling

There's a useful point here about the use of anonymous sources in British vs. American journalism here.

British journalism is generally much happier to rely on single anonymous sources to break news, and I think you really see the problem with that in Brexit coverage.

https://twitter.com/CoppetainPU/status/1174443834547286016

There's a lot of Whitehall scoops at the moment that seem to come from Dominic-Cummings-with-a-fake-moustache.

These stories have a really poor track record of turning out to be either meretricious smears or just false bluster.

It's possible this is somehow a series of separate Downing Street sources with the exact same MO rather than the same source again and again.

Either way, the source or sources have a terrible track record and should be treated with extreme caution.

But I don't see that happening, or much soul-searching among the lobby.

At the very least people shouldn't be running stuff from these sources, even on Twitter, without *verifying* with other sources with better track records.

That's going to involve serious outlets leaving "scoops" on the table, or worse still leaving them to competitors with lower standards, so obviously the structural incentives of breaking news run strongly against it.

But *getting things right* should be the priority.

I think the tendency is to think that moustache-Cummings is powerful and well-connected and therefore a good source.

I'd suggest that a powerful and well-connected figure with a track record of lying to the media is an *extremely bad source*.

That doesn't mean you can never use them, but you need to verify them to death and treat everything they say with the assumption they're trying to manipulate you.

That's the step that appears to be getting missed at the moment.