If you’re a regular reader of this space, chances are you know that I’m no fan of anonymous sources in traditional media.

(Tabloids, as we—and John Edwards—have learned over the past few months, are a different animal entirely. Paying sources for information opens an entirely new can of worms; money can be an incentive and a disincentive when it comes to getting the truth.)

But I digress.

Today’s example of anonymous-sourcing-leads-to-sloppy-reporting is the traditional media’s handling of the news of the untimely death of U.S. Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio.

Jones suffered an aneurysm on Tuesday. She was hospitalized. Many traditional media outlets—including the Associated Press, CNN, Fox, the web site for the Washington Post and even Tubbs Jones’ hometown paper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer —reported early Wednesday afternoon that she had died, based on information from “various Democratic officials who spoke on condition of anonymity,“ according to the AP.

Only one problem with that: She hadn’t. She was in critical condition, but she was still alive.

So the news orgs published a corrected article based on information provided by medical officials at the hospital where Tubbs Jones was being treated.

And by the time people were starting to come around to the realization that Tubbs Jones had, in fact, not died, she had.

So the press had to run with the original versions of their stories. And people were left to wonder whether it was just the latest example of sloppy journalism run amok, or if Tubbs Jones really was alive.

This AP article details how the story became a murky, muddled mess: It’s an anonymous source finger-pointing fest.

But no one in the mainstream media seems willing to point the finger at the man (or woman) in the mirror, even though they could have avoided all this confusion (and those annoying and ego-busting corrections) had they simply insisted on getting the report of Tubbs Jones’ death on the record before they reported it as fact.

(The old timers used to call that cumbersome, outdated and redundant process “reporting.“)

And that’s how the story about the Tubbs Jones story came to be its own AP story.

One more note: Those “various Democratic officials who spoke on condition of anonymity” were never identified—even in the story about the story that ended up not being true.

Ah, irony: You wield a bitter sword.

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