Hacker News Reader

You don’t think that if the story were true and could be easily proven, Bloomberg would have done it?

One possible explanation for Bloomberg's actions is that they have corroboration of Appleboum's claims that they can't reveal publicly. One source without proof would never be able drive a story like this, but if they had multiple, independent corroborating sources, they might feel confident enough to publish; maybe they hoped public corroboration would follow.

Or a journalist saw a chance to get famous quickly and didn't bother to verify the sources.

The story was so good that everyone wanted it to be true and nobody said that it looks like an incoherent mess.

No journalist gets to publish stories on their own. Stories always have internal review with at least the relevant editor, and big stories get multiple levels. The authors worked on it for months. If this was a case of rushing it out without enough verification, then there's many more than just the two journalists at fault.

Which is totally possible, but normal journalistic practices already exist to prevent just what you suggest, and are the norm, not the exception.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com