Those who read this blog regularly know how fond I am of unattributed opinion in news reports.

Today’s offender is Silla Brush of U.S. News:

Elected with a mandate to clean up Washington, congressional Democrats on oversight committees across Capitol Hill are still just revving up….

There’s no doubt that corruption played a role in November’s election results. Still, Ms. Brush lacks the facts to assert a mandate without a source’s attribution.

How much harder would her job have been if she had asked a lawmaker, congressional or election expert, or center-left think tanker to respond to the theory that November election results represented a mandate for change? Not hard at all. I’m sure she could have found someone to paint that picture for her.

As it is, the piece reads as if Ms. Brush or one of her editors made up the idea of a mandate.

I might have skipped this transgression, but I already had offered Kevin Whitelaw and Anna Mulrine of U.S. News a free pass for this unattributed passage in a story about the Iraq troop surge:

What kind of “victory,” realistically, is achievable at this point? Certainly not a model democracy. Probably not even a particularly stable government, but perhaps one that would present some semblance of central authority and deny al Qaeda a new home for its training camps. What would failure be? These days, most Americans would probably settle for anything less than an all-out civil or regional war-as long as it brings the troops home. More voices are arguing that maybe the goal should simply be getting U.S. troops out of Iraq, whatever the consequences.

You’ll have to wait a couple of paragraphs to read the name of a source; that source is talking about a different subject. 

I write these occasional diatribes with no desire to pick on these writers. Instead, my goals are: to remind you to ask “says who?” when you read these types of passages in news stories; and to remind writers of their journalistic duties to attribute opinion to sources.