It’s not easy to wean media from anonymous sources

On the day I started to write this column, a casual reading of the New York Times turned up stories that included such attributions as “an administration official said” and “according to two people close to the negotiations” and “a Republican strategist who did not want to be quoted by name” and “according to government officials who have seen copies of the briefing documents.”

The absence of named sources in these stories might not have registered so strongly on me had the stories not been published just two weeks after the New York Times announced a new policy discouraging the use of unnamed sources.

The first sentence of that policy memo began:

“Readers of the New York Times demand to know as much as possible about where we obtain our information and why it merits their trust.”

I don’t mean to suggest that the specific examples of anonymity that I cited above could or should have been avoided. I don’t know enough about the circumstances surrounding any of them. But their presence so soon after the Times issued its new policy shows just how difficult it will be to consistently implement that policy.

For too long, too many reporters at too many newspapers have not only easily granted anonymity but have eagerly offered it to too many sources. What Leonard Downie, the executive editor of the Washington Post, rightly calls “the culture of anonymity” is deeply entrenched in big-city journalism, and we’re all the worse for it.

The media’s over-reliance on unnamed sources creates reader skepticism, underminines media credibility and contributes significantly to perceptions of media bias.

This is especially true in the aftermath of the Jayson Blair scandal at the New York Times.

That’s why both the New York Times and the Washington Post, arguably the two most prestigious newspapers in the country -- and inarguably the two that have been damaged the most by miscreants in their midst -- have both recently announced stringent new policies on anonymous sourcing.

The New York Times’ Feb. 25 policy statement is part of the paper’s continuing attempt to change policies and practices that helped make possible Blair’s serial fabrications, a shocking lapse that led to the forced resignations of its top two editors last year.

The Washington Post went through a similar bout of self-examination and self-recrimination -- and a tightening of standards -- 23 years ago, when the paper had to forfeit a Pulitzer Prize won for Janet Cooke’s heart-wrenching story about an 8-year-old heroin addict who, it turned out, did not exist.

Now, the Post has again reviewed and revised “our policies on accuracy, fairness and our relationships with news sources and readers,” as Downie wrote in the paper early this month.

“The Washington Post is committed to disclosing to its readers the sources of the information in its stories to the maximum possible extent,” the Post’s seven-page, Feb. 19 policy statement began. “We want to make our reporting as transparent to the readers as possible so they may know how and where we got our information.”

Both the Post’s and the Times’ memos went on in some detail to spell out their renewed determination to limit the use of anonymous sources. “Anonymity,” the Times said, “must not be automatic or an assumed condition ... [and] should not be offered to a source.” It should not be granted to people engaged in speculation or to those who “use it as cover for a personal or partisan attack.”

The Post said, “Named sources are vastly to be preferred to unnamed sources. Reporters should press to have sources go on the record.”

This is an admirable statement of principle -- but one that is especially difficult to enforce in Washington, where sources often hide behind national security, and in Hollywood, where they often hide behind personal insecurity.

Early this month, the New York Times published a story about Michael Eisner that lamented, “As is customary in Hollywood, many people insisted on anonymity when speaking about Mr. Eisner.” The story went on to quote both “an entertainment lawyer who has had frequent dealings with the Disney company” and “a former Disney television executive who resigned from [the] company in frustration several years ago and who asked not to be identified for fear of a lawsuit.”

Those characterizations are clearly a big improvement on the time-(dis)honored “sources said.” But they’re still nameless. That may have been unavoidable. Again, I don’t know the circumstances -- and there are instances in which the use of unnamed sources is necessary.

“Exceptions will occur in the reporting of highly sensitive stories,” the Times memo said, “when it is we who have sought out a source who may face legal jeopardy or loss of livelihood for speaking with us.”

When anonymity is granted, the Times said, it should be “the subject of energetic negotiation to arrive at phrasing that will tell the reader as much as possible about the placement and motivation of the source, in particular, whether the source has firsthand knowledge of the facts.”

The Post memo agrees:

“In some circumstances, we will have no choice but to grant confidentiality to our sources.”

In his March 7 column, Downie acknowledged that if Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had been required to name all their sources in their Watergate stories, “they would not have been able to report much of that scandal.” Downie also gave recent examples of the importance -- at times -- of unnamed sources.

The Post tried before

The issue of the media’s over-reliance on unnamed sources has been argued since long before Blair, or even Cooke, became synonymous with perfidy, of course.

In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, the Post tried to break the cycle of anonymity involved in various government briefings by boycotting those at which officials insisted on being identified only vaguely (“a State Department official”) or not at all.

“The public interest is not served by permitting statements of policy to be made by government officials who are unwilling to be held accountable for their own words,” said Ben Bradlee, then the Post’s executive editor.

The Post’s policy “didn’t last three weeks,” Bradlee later told me. “No one [in the media] would go along with us.... We couldn’t do it [end the practice of anonymous briefings] alone.”

Several years later, the Post tried again, this time indirectly attacking the long-standing practice of the secretary of state (whoever he happened to be at the time) briefing reporters on flights back from high-level diplomatic meetings but being identified only as “a senior State Department official.”

To accompany one such story, which used just that identification, the Post published a photo of Cyrus Vance, then the secretary of state. Beneath the photo were the words “a senior State Department official.”

Though many in Washington found that amusing, it changed nothing.

Will the new pangs of conscience born of the Blair disaster -- and an ever-growing chorus of public skepticism and hostility toward the media -- lead to more permanent change this time?

I certainly hope so -- and I applaud the New York Times and Washington Post for making the effort. I hope other papers will do likewise.

The Los Angeles Times last formally addressed the anonymity question a couple of years ago, when Editor John Carroll issued a memo to the staff urging that unnamed sources be used only as “a last resort” and only when the information provided by such sources is “very important.”

Carroll acknowledged last week that “we’re not entirely living up to” this policy and said a new Times code of ethics now being drafted would tackle this issue anew.

Good. Anonymity -- what we in the news business call “blind sourcing” -- does more to undermine our credibility than any other journalistic (mal) practice I can think of.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read his previous “Media Matters” columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-media.