Zing!

CJR with a spot on observation about dateline manipulation.

Maureen Dowd’s New Hampshire morning-after column was probably written in Jerusalem, despite trumpeting the words “DERRY, NH” right up top.
...
The New York Times has acknowledged that the people-on-the-scene quotes from Clinton’s victory party were collected by an assistant, as is common practice. And they’re defending the bylining as totally kosher, claiming she’d been in Derry, for some time, at some point.

Well, okay. But if the in-house rules allow—indeed, sanction—such easy manipulation, what good could they be?

Not like anyone's assessment of an article hinges on where the author claims to have been while they wrote it, but at this point - you might as well drop the location from the byline entirely.

This can be distinguished from the assumption that a TV reporter knows more about what happened at a location when they are standing in front of it. They can be just as ignorant back in the studio, but at least the camera will establish that they were, in fact, there.

Putting a fabricated byline in the article, would be like the TV reporter green-screening themselves to report "from the scene."