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bart_calendar June 25 2014, 11:14:14 UTC
While Brooks is a scumbucket I will say that when I was a journalist my editors often made it extremley clear that they did not want to know who or what some of my sources were.

In my case this happened often when I got assistant prosecutors to leak me information from grand jury testimony. Releasing grand jury testimony is a felony in New Jersey and while my editors were delighted with the information they certainly did not want me to ever be able to say they new I was an accessory to that. (Though they must have strongly suspected.)

It would also often happen when police sources gave me information that I needed when I promised them I'd hold back on stuff I knew but didn't need that badly. (I.e. "Dude, I don't give a shit that you go to Canada to fuck hookers, but I'd sure like to know the name of your lead suspect in the murder that's going to be on the front page tomorrow.") They probably suspected this since these conversations tended to happen in bars in the mid afternoon and I would expense my drinks (tacitly admitting that I was either a fraud or getting some information while drinking.)

The third type of situation this would happen with was when I'd be able to get rock stars to give me much more controversial and interesting quotes than our competition could. The reason was that the competitor was very professional while I was more than willing to drink or do drugs with the rock stars and if you get fucked up with someone they tell you more/better shit. Again, they had to suspect but didn't want to "know" that I was doing cocaine/pot/random hallucinogenic drug on the clock.

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andrewducker June 25 2014, 12:18:24 UTC
Oh yes - she may well have been wilfully ignorant - but it's worth noting that Coulson _was_ convicted ,and we have plenty of evidence from during his reign. So either she was vastly cleverer at managing the situation or things really were different.

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bart_calendar June 25 2014, 12:22:23 UTC
I suspect she knew that the information was being gathered in a dodgy way but made it clear she didn't want to be told what dodgy way and that because of that she had no clue phone tapping was going on. Though she almost certainly knew that something unethical, illegal or both was going on - but from my experience that's par for the course. It's really hard to get breaking news without breaking the law or normal human ethics (one of the reasons I burnt out on journalism by age 30.)

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