That's Their Plan . . . Travel into the Past . . . To Assimilate the Future!

To sum up all; there are archives at every stage to be look'd into, and rolls, records, documents, and endless genealogies, which justice ever and anon calls him back to stay the reading of:—In short there is no end of it;—for my own part, I declare I have been at it these six weeks, making all the speed I possibly could,—and am not yet born:—I have just been able, and that's all, to tell you when it happen'd, but not how;—so that you see the thing is yet far from being accomplished.

-Sterne, Tristram Shandy

Given my position on The Media, I find the somewhat obsessive, uh, obsession with the mainstream press' hypocritical standards regarding anonymity and pseudonymity a bit confounding. Every once in a while, though, even I have to chuckle ruefully at a forehead-smacker:

“We don’t know how to react,” one frustrated administration official said on Monday. “This obviously puts Congress and the public in a bad mood.”

This curious case of hidden identity occurs in a fairly remarkable exercise in self-reflection, whereby the principle American organ for reporting on a cache of tens of thousands of leaked, formerly secret documents makes the principle line of inquiry the potential effect that the reporting of said documents by such paper will have on the public, as speculated upon by government officials, and how this will in turn affect the actions of these same, speculative officials. In other words, the newspaper asked the government how it would be affected by the way it imagined the public might react to information that the newspaper itself is about to report. (Take a note, Nolan.)

I guess it would be simpler to report the information contained in the document, observe the resultant public reaction and the subsequent government response, and then report on what you've observed, but it wouldn't be nearly so much fun.