Surely one of the worst (and most frequent) abuses of the blind quote is its use in delivering insults. New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent noted the scurrilous gossip about the famed Juror No. 4 in the Tyco trial:
She lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and on Friday people at her apartment building described her as standoffish. A concierge said she rarely spoke to the staff members except to give orders and, unlike other tenants, had never given a Christmas bonus to him or, as far as he knew, to the doormen. The concierge declined to give his name, saying he feared retaliation.
Or take this courageous stand in The Washington Post about NPR's much contested decision to drop Bob Edwards as Morning Edition host:
An NPR executive who declined to be quoted by name because he will continue to work with Edwards said the host "didn't have the pace and the engagement with reporters in the field that we are looking for."
Perhaps a more forthright explanation would have been:
An NPR executive who "didn't have the guts to criticize on the record but was happy to poison the well anonymously, which we eagerly enabled him to do"...
Or here's
one from a
Post story about how Bush's low profile during tough times was being questioned:
"If it were I in charge over there, I would have him out early next week to explain this whole thing," said a Republican strategist close to the Bush team who demanded anonymity as a condition of speaking freely about the administration. "He should restate what we're doing over there. He needs to provide a bigger picture to give voters more confidence that we know where we're going."
Here I'd propose "a strategist who wanted to be able to deliver critical judgments without paying any penalty, meanwhile ingratiating himself to the reporter."
Come to think of it, if we're going to keep allowing this kind of anonymous insult-slinging in the new era of greater forthrightness about our sources, then we should be seeing phrases like "a senior administration official long known in Washington for his pithy blind quotes" or "who never goes on the record when the chips are down," or "always eager to slime an opponent with impunity." Then at least we'd all be clear about the game we're playing.
But surely there is one kind of anonymity we could rather easily stamp out. Take this example from a story about a declassified memo relating to 9/11:
In a conference call Saturday with reporters, administration officials who insisted on anonymity said there was no evidence that either the call to the U.S. Embassy in the UAE or the surveillance of federal buildings in New York by Yemenis was related to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
For this usage, I propose "administration officials who were not brave enough to defend the president on the record." How much courage does this take? Do they WANT to see the defense in the paper? I'm betting that turning these officials down one time would have them back in no time — as in the experience recounted by Matt Wickenheiser, a reporter at the Portland (Maine) Press Herald.
...will ever twig to the notion that maybe, just maybe,...
