Anonymous sources in news reports
Anonymous sources in news reports
(excerpts from Edward Wasserman: Novak-Plame – Historic chapter or a sorry footnote? In W&L Journalism and Mass Communications, August 23, 2004)
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Commentaries generally frame both matters as tets of reporter-source confidentiality, and argue that these reporters must keep their silence if any reporters are ever to be trusted in the future.
Should you care? I think so. It’s good that journalists offer a way for people who want protection from reprisals to expose matters that you should know about. The classic whistleblowers might otherwise swallow their outrage about the sleazy financial double-cross or the toxic dumping cover-up and say nothing rather than face vindictive litigation or job loss.
Unfortunately, that scenario has nothing to do with most stories that use anonymous informants. Confidentiality has become a means not to unseat the powerful but to entrench them, by affording them privileged access to news conduits for self-serving leaks that they can then denounce.
We no longer notice how much of our news comes from “senior administration officials,” “Western diplomats”, “congressional sources,” and “financial experts,” none identified by name or agenda. One study found that 40 percent of A-section stories in the New York Times in December 2003 used anonymous sources.