PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY

Commenting on his newspaper’s coverage - or rather its lack thereof - of the ACORN scandal, Clark Hoyt, "public editor" of the New York Times, writes that

[Jill Abramson, the NYT managing editor for news] and Bill Keller, the executive editor, said last week that they would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies. Keller declined to identify the editor, saying he wanted to spare that person "a bombardment of e-mails and excoriation in the blogosphere."

Somehow, I think that the refusal to identify the editor is to protect him/her (and the New York Times) from being “bombarded” with facts, tips, research, stories, leads, etc., from the right side of the blogosphere. It’s hard to maintain plausible deniability of knowledge of a story when a hundred bloggers can post “Hey, I sent you a tip on ... and here’s the email to prove it.”