Of Course You Should Have Credited Him

David Corn of The Nation asks whether the Post  should have credited a story by Corn and Jeff Goldberg on Mark Felt.

A word to my non-journalist readers: News outlets hate to credit anyone else for anything. But if someone breaks a story before you do, you're supposed to give credit--usually as late in the story as you can get away with.

In this case, the details concern a story Corn wrote citing documents that show FBI official Mark Felt was, at one time, in charge of the investigation to find out who Deep Throat was. Namely, him, which he never got around to telling his boss. After Corn published his story, the Post's Michael Dobbs filed one of his own,  with that detail, citing the same documents, and moving the story forward with new developments. Corn complains, posts a query at Romanesko, a liberal-friendly journalists' site, and Dobb responds:

I didn’t credit his article in the Nation for a very simple reason: it did not help me in any way with either the reporting or the writing of my own piece. I don’t know when Corn “unearthed” the FBI files he writes about, but I had located the relevant memos (as well as numerous others) during a visit to the FBI FOIA reading room a week prior to the publication of his article. My reporting was original, and did not derive in any way from Corn’s reporting. My article included a lot of details he didn’t have.

This is a hilarious standard: It doesn't matter if you print it first, it matters if I knew it first. According to Erik Wemple of Washington's City Paper,

From what I've been able to ascertain, their Credit-o-Meter assigns low value to whether another publication had the scoop first; what the Credit-o-Meter cares about is whether the Post KNEW about the information before the competing publication did. In other words, if Dobbs had those FBI memos in hand at the time Corn's piece was published, the Credit-o-Meter will kick out a no-attribution verdict for the Nation. Whether or not you agree with this standard, the Post does appear to be consistent in applying it.