If you read New York Times and Washington Post and some other US news outlets regularly, you will find that sometimes these newspapers will publish news based on anonymous sources from the intelligence community of the US. In my view, they do this a lot, specially WaPo and NYT. Seems like these two newspaper has very good sources in the heart of the US Government.

But when you remember the Iraq war and the role played by NYT in that war, you may want to take a pause and think twice before reading those news and accepting the news on the face of it. NYT admitted this and kinda say sorry. The reality is, US officials do selectively leak certain intelligence to the newspaper to shape the domestic policy and politics (please see below).

Few days back, I was reading an article on NYT about Chinese disinformation on the coronavirus against the USA. The article quoted US Intelligence officials and other government officials. But crucially they did not disclose how they got the information.

If we stand back and take a look at the whole picture, I am not sure what to think. Specially NYT itself had reported in the past that China has almost eliminated all of US spies in Mainland China. And when China expelled some US journalist last month, one NYT article claimed that since there are no US spies in China, the expelled journalists were ‘better sources’. Here is a quote from the article:

The administration “didn’t really accomplish much,” said Marcus Brauchli, a former Wall Street Journal editor and former China correspondent. He said that he doubted the U.S. government had “better sources on the ground than the journalists who were expelled. So they just sacrificed one eye — for what?”

Now, after reading the article on China disinformation, the question is how the US officials are getting their intelligence from China, where apparently, there is no good US spies. Did NYT Journalists ask this question and verify (which may be impossible in this case) the answer?

In fact, in the same article, the NYT journalist acknowledged that there is a chance of selective leak by the government officials to shape the domestic politics in the following manner:

Given the toxic information environment, foreign policy analysts are worried that the Trump administration may politicize intelligence work or make selective leaks to promote an anti-China narrative. Those concerns hover around the speculation over the origin of the virus. American officials in the past have selectively passed intelligence to reporters to shape the domestic political landscape; the most notable instance was under President George W. Bush in the run-up to the Iraq War.

Given all these, I think we should approach any article published on NYT or WaPo or any other US news outlet which are based on US Intelligence sources, with a bit of scepticism.