The criticism of Rosen is that according to his own accounts, some of his private sources had problems with Sonia, and then hooked him up with sources close to her that THEY selected, all anonymous, and then used it to write a smear piece that profoundly affected her life while all factual elements in his article are simply false.
For such a controversial story, there are people who are willing to go on the record, relying on cherrpicked anonymous gossip seems unethical journalistically.
px75's Salon link is the best.
I don't think repeating such gossip is unethical, as long as their is full disclosure that the sources have a bias so should be taken as dispositive. Do you disagree with that? Why should Rosen "know" the buzz, yet have some duty not to share it?
Because Rosen claims that the people who provided these negative comments/smears on Sotomayor are ''prominent liberal scholars'' but we are unable to verify that because they all speak in anonymity. For all we know they might have an invested interest into seeing somebody else picked for the Supreme Court and they are willingly lying in order to sabotage Sotomayor (like Rosen himself apparently).
And as Greenwald says if they are indeed prominent legal scholars and not lawyers or clerks, then there is no excuse for them for refusing to talk on the record. Except of course if they want to lie and smear, and they want to do it with impunity.
Of course there is also the problem of Rosen's own bias which showed mostly at his previous article where he questioned Sotomayor's intelligence and character, even though he admitted that he hasn't read any of her opinions. And not only that, but his main argument for her supposedly mediocre legal skils turned out to be completely false. And when he was caught he refused to apologize and instead offered some silly excuse about how there is a subliminal criticism somewhere in the footnote of judge Winter, which can only be perceived by Rosen's anonymous sources.
And it's funny how Rosen failed to find one person to speak positively about Sotomayor when so many other journalists had no such problem. And they all spoke on record of course.
