By Pat Walters
Naughton Fellow
Are today’s journalists serving the public or their sources? That’s the question recent events, most notably the trial of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, prompted writer Nick Madigan to ask himself. As he reported an op-ed for The Baltimore Sun, he put that question to Poynter’s Bob Steele.
Here’s Steele’s part in the piece:
Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., said the Libby case “may be
one of those where veteran journalists are prone to too easily and too
quickly give the protection of confidentiality” to a source.
“Sometimes it happens out of a sense of familiarity and the kind of
give-and-take relationship between a reporter and a government
official, a law enforcement officer, the coach of a team or a business
executive — someone the journalist covers regularly,” Steele said. But
such protection “should be well down on the list of options that the
journalist chooses for gaining information,” he said.
Either
way, he went on, the use of anonymous sources “diminishes the accuracy
of a story if names are not included,” and “reduces the accountability
of the source, particularly if the source is making allegations.”
So, for a variety of reasons, confidential sources aren’t the best way for journalists to get information into the newspaper. But how is a reporter supposed to get people to talk, to give up the dirt nobody wants publicized? When, if ever, is it okay to offer anonymity to a source?
Poynter Online editor Bill Mitchell had this to contribute:
on the local level as they are in Washington.
It’s hardly surprising.
I can testify from three years as a city
hall reporter — as well as three years as a Washington
correspondent — that it’s much easier
on both the reporter and the source for a quote to go unattributed.
The reporter faces less accountability
from the source, in terms of the quote’s
accuracy. The source faces less accountability
from the public, in
terms of defending the claim
he or she makes in the quote. It’s the
audience that is short-changed.
In a piece published
back in June of 2004,
I suggested this approach:
- If the news in
a story stands up without anonymous
sources, resist the urge to add them for
background or color.
- If you can support part, but
not all of a story without anonymous
sources, go with the more limited
version. If you think
the story can be marginally improved
by using anonymous sources, in
other words, think again.
As Gene Roberts likes to say, many stories
ooze rather than break. And a string of
thoroughly-sourced stories that ooze over
time — with
one fully-sourced story after another chipping
away at the truth — can serve readers better than a one-shot story that
breaks with great fanfare and relies
on anonymous sources.
- If the only way to get an important
story published is
to rely on anonymous sources, do it. But
do it in
a way that recognizes reader skepticism
and facilitates
ongoing scrutiny
of the anonymously-sourced material.
use of unnamed sources in The New York Times,
and I offered the following suggestion
for tracking them on a weekly basis.
Wouldn’t it
be interesting,
for example, if the Times‘ “Week in Review”
section included
a box each week listing
the major anonymously-sourced assertions from the previous week’s news pages? A cumulative version
of the box could be maintained
online, providing
a running tally of such stories
over time. Enterprising
readers — and competing journalists — could use the list as a guide
to the ongoing scrutiny
anonymous sources deserve and still don’t receive.
Given the competition
for that section’s valuable real estate, it’s no surprise we’ve yet to see anything
like the anonymous-sourcing box I proposed. But how
about you journalism students and bloggers
out there? You could do something like this.
For some more explicit advice, take a glance at the guidelines for anonymous sourcing used by The New York Times and Poynter Online.
