UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that:
CNN obtained a personal journal that belonged to the slain American ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and broadcast reports based on its contents against the wishes of the Stevens family, according to relatives and State Department officials who were asked to intervene by the family.
Wonder why the media is so unpopular?
HuffPo's Micheal Calderone is up with a piece about CNN's Anderson Cooper's admission that they had "found" Ambassador Christopher Steven's journal shortly after his murder at the Bengazi consulate.
According to Micheal Calderone:
On Wednesday on his show, "Anderson Cooper 360," Cooper told Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that "a source familiar with Ambassador Stevens' thinking told us that in the months before his death he talked about being worried about the never-ending security threats that he was facing in Benghazi and specifically about the rise in Islamic extremism and growing al Qaeda presence." The source, Cooper continued, "also mentioned [Stevens] being on an al Qaeda hit list."
But what Cooper didn't reveal at the time was that CNN's sourcing was tied, at least partially, to Stevens' thinking as written in his personal journal.
Besides possibly interfering with a Federal investigation, this strikes me as the journalistic equivalent of grave robbing.
In response to HuffPo's inquiry CNN, which had repeatedly referred to "sources familiar with Amb. Steven's thinking" said:
CNN notified Stevens' family about the journal within hours after it was discovered and at the family's request provided it to them via a third party.
The journal consists of just seven pages of handwriting in a hard-bound book.
For CNN, the ambassador's writings served as tips about the situation in Libya, and in Benghazi in particular. CNN took the newsworthy tips and corroborated them with other sources.
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Perhaps to mitigate the ethical lapse, CNN, when pressed,
elaborated:
"We came upon the journal through our reporting and notified the family," a CNN spokeswoman told The Huffington Post late Friday night. "At their request, we returned it to them. We reported on what we found newsworthy in the Ambassador's writings."
Paging Howard Kurtz. This seems tailor made for "Reliable Sources."