Journalism Junction

Amid the scandal news, as newspapers feverishly examine ethical policies and ponder new ones, they could hardly do better than to brush up on an old standby: name your sources.

Most papers have perfectly good rules about anonymity. It's just that they ignore them -- especially in the Washington-New York media capitals. It's not because the problems of anonymity are never noted.
The Project for Excellence in Journalism took a look at coverage of the Clinton scandals -- finding it rife with anonymity -- and asked "whether the press has become too lax about offering readers as much information as possible, and whether journalists have allowed sources to dictate terms too easily." The answer, I'd say, is a clear "YES."

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The question recurs now regarding New York Times Iraqi war coverage –- an issue that may prove more consequential than Rick Bragg's absence on an oyster boat or even Jayson Blair's fabrications.

The Wash Post's Howie Kurtz looks at an internal e-mail between NY Times weapons reporter Judith Miller and Baghdad bureau chief John Burns concerning the controversial exile leader Ahmad Chalabi -- and asks, "Could Chalabi have been using the Times to build a drumbeat that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction?"

A fine question.

Miller acknowledges that Chalabi is the unnamed source who "has provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper" -– exclusives which have yet to pan out.

Anonymity allows the media to be used. It robs readers of any way to judge the source. It lets people speak without taking responsibility. It undermines our credibility. Yet it is common practice among our most revered journalists.

The Washington Post''s recent history is inextricably tied with anonymity. It underlies the Post's finest and worst moments –- Watergate and Janet Cooke. My predecessor as ombudsman, JoAnn Byrd, wrote wryly in her last column (on June 18, 1995) that she had "planned to offer a reward for the apprehension of the person who started the anonymous-source epidemic in Washington."

Within months, my own anonymity-in-excess tear began, eventually including more than a dozen columns. One quoted an ombudsman from a quarter-century earlier. One noted 24 anonymous citations from one front-page story on Hillary Clinton. "Suppose He Didn't Do It?" examined the case of Richard Jewell, anonymously fingered (and later unfingered) in the Atlanta Olympics bombing case. A couple cited the work of that revered journalist who might rightly be dubbed Mr. Anonymity himself, Bob Woodward.

The current ombudsman has joined the battle with "According to Someone" last Sunday. Maybe the painful public process ongoing at the Times will be the push we all need to understand at last that the old rule of "naming your sources" exists for good reason.

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One more piece of evidence that good journalism is good business: "In a new contribution to the discussion about how editorial quality affects the bottom line, figures from the just-released Inland Trend Analysis Reports suggest that, at least for smaller papers, increased newsroom spending (over the long term) appears to be associated with larger-than-average revenue increases -- while editorial spending cuts are linked with flat or shrinking revenue." (See the study and read the E&P story.)