Again, from the perspective of a journalist, what's been amazing about this story is the total lack of caution by the reporters covering it.
Good reporters live in constant terror of stories blowing up in their faces. That's why you don't run major breaking news stories based on a single unnamed source. Someone who tells a reporter something w/o attribution can easily have an agenda, knowing that if it turns out to be wrong, the reporter is going to take the heat, not the source.
People like Kravitz and Mortensen were incredibly reckless to run these stories. It's the journalistic equivalent of unsafe sex. To a lesser degree people like Ben Volin were making the same mistake when they let unnamed sources point a finger at Harbaugh.
With these scandals, you have to stand firm with sources and tell them: if you want to lob an accusation at someone, put your name on it. Unless you've checked the info six ways to Sunday, it's otherwise too big a risk, professionally to say nothing of morally, to accuse people in public without hard evidence. It's incredible that so many reporters got sucked into this.
