Reihan Salam is right to argue that Michael Gordon hasn't gotten a completely fair shake over the last week. Yes, he has written some bad pieces. The one from last Saturday was particularly bad, and he should be taken to task for it. I'm too lazy to get the links, but I wrote a post about that awful Saturday piece, and, having read other people opine on it, I quickly came to the conclusion that it was even worse than I initially argued.*
But a lot of his critics -- including, embarrassingly, writers for Editor & Publisher, whose job it is to know such things -- have failed to mention that he's done a lot of excellent reporting, including that which yielded Cobra II, a book which many of the people criticizing him have probably used to argue the Bush administration's incompetence in waging the Iraq war.
Does that mean he should get a pass? Absolutely not. But it does mean that if you're going to criticize him at length, a fair assessment of his work as a reporter requires acknowledging the good as well as the bad he's done, even if you do it simply as an aside. I'm all for ideologically-motivated media criticism, but it should still be competently done, which, to my mind at least, requires not giving a completely one-sided assessment of a person's work. Any blogger, for instance, has written his/her fair share of bad posts (myself included). It's not particularly fair to call someone an irredeemable hack by singling out a post, if you happen to know that other things he/she has written are perfectly sound if not brilliant.
*I'm still not completely in line with a lot of people's take on Gordon's story. I think one major problem with it was that there was never any follow-up, which the story suggested was coming, about the merits of the claims he was asserting. (I'm setting aside all the problems, of course, about his lack of specificity in identifying agencies, and his unforgivable generosity with anonymity.) Occasionally stories are going to be written where the government makes claims that can't be immediately verified; the responsible thing to do is hold the story or run it but fact-check the hell out of it in an equally prominent follow-up. Recall that the knocks against the pre-war Iraq reporting weren't all about evaluating intelligence claims -- which, for better or worse, reporters will often be unable to do -- but, rather, included the failure to prominently place subsequent stories that cast doubts on previously reported administration claims.
