Bill Carter is back with another article about the Letterman-Koppel matter. The ABC folks are trying to spin the story to say, "We almost got Dave" while the Letterman forces are trying to emphasize that Dave wasn't really willing to see Ted Koppel ousted. I doubt that very many folks — apart from those who have a reason to believe these assertions — will believe these assertions. Perhaps significantly, Carter talks about the impact that his original story had on the negotiations and mentions that ABC feared the fact that they were talking to Dave would leak…but Carter does not say something like, "Letterman's people were shocked to find that the story had leaked." This sure sounds to me like the writer is doing a certain amount of butt-covering, trying to please certain of his sources without fibbing in the pages of The New York Times.
It all raises the age-old question of reporters protecting sources at the risk of presenting an incomplete or inaccurate story. Back when Ken Starr's office was being accused of leaking to the press, you had reporters who were allegedly the recipients of those leaks, who were also reporting on the accusations without commenting on their veracity. As many onlookers noted at the time, those reporters knew whether or not they'd received leaks from Starr's crew. If they had, then when they quoted Starr's denials, they were printing statements they knew to be untrue. If they hadn't received such leaks, then they were reporting — without comment — allegations of lawbreaking they knew to be unfounded. Either way, they were knowingly letting someone fill their articles with either false denials or false accusations.
Based on the timing and the fact that Letterman seems to have benefited from Carter's initial story, it is widely presumed that Dave's side leaked it. Carter denied that casually on the Charlie Rose program but sidesteps the issue in this new, for-the-record article. If Letterman's people did plant the story, then Carter — by omitting that information — is protecting a source at the cost of leaving out perhaps the most significant part of the story. If Letterman's people didn't plant the story, then Carter is allowing a lot of people to wrongly assume a bit of negotiating skullduggery. I'm not sure this conundrum can ever be avoided if reporters are going to protect sources…but it's worth noting that, when they do, it often means that some facet of the truth is not going to be served.