NY Times on Anonymous Sources

The New York Times Public Editor discusses the results of a report he commissioned examining the use of anonymous sources. Results - People don't trust them, Their use has decreased in the years since Jason Blair, contrary to the purpose of Times policy they now seem to be used mainly to supply opinion and not fact, and reporters are not clear enough in describing the source, how they came to the knowledge they have and why they must be anonymous.

Readers hate anonymous sources because they cannot judge the sources’ credibility for themselves.

“How does a reader or a viewer know if the ‘high-ranking official’ ... simply has an ax to grind and may even be the janitor or imaginary?” wrote James R. Poling of Laguna Niguel, Calif., who said he discounts stories with unnamed sources because he does not trust news organizations and thinks they are biased.

Because the painful Jayson Blair scandal involved articles containing unnamed sources who apparently did not exist, The Times tightened its standards in 2004. Bill Keller, the executive editor, and Allan Siegal, then the standards editor, wrote a policy declaring, “We resist granting sources anonymity except as a last resort to obtain information that we believe to be newsworthy and reliable.”

The policy requires that at least one editor know the identity of every source. Anonymous sources cannot be used when on-the-record sources are readily available. They must have direct knowledge of the information they are imparting; they cannot use the cloak of anonymity for personal or partisan attack; they cannot be used for trivial comment or to make an unremarkable comment seem more important than it is.

Although the purpose of the policy was not explicitly to reduce the number of anonymous sources, Keller said last week, “If you tell the editing system to be more challenging of anonymous sources, it ought to reduce the number.”

...

The number of articles relying on anonymous sources fell by roughly half after the policy was introduced.

Most anonymous sources — nearly 80 percent — were still not adequately described to readers. How did they know their information? Why did they need anonymity? But that was still better than before the policy, when nearly 90 percent were inadequately described.

The use of anonymous sources to air opinion, not fact, increased after 2004, even though the policy would seem to discourage that.

...

The study highlighted something that bothers readers and that Times editors were already trying to fix: the common but uninformative explanation that a source could not be named “because he was not authorized to discuss the matter.” Sanjay Arwade, a reader from Amherst, Mass., wrote recently to ask if such explanations “really mean anything more than that the source did not want to be quoted by name. They seem like empty justifications to me.”

In an in-house critique to the staff in April, Phil Corbett, the deputy news editor in charge of the style manual, said that relying “on such standard formulas works directly against our goals in accounting for anonymous sourcing.” He said that if the source is afraid of getting in trouble with the boss, that is what the explanation should say. But the more important thing to tell readers, Corbett said, is how reliable the source is. The Columbia students found that The Times failed to do that quite often.

Personally from my completely subjective point of view I have seen no decrease in the use of anonymous sources, and I am always suspicious of the unanmed guy who always says exactly the right thing, but if the Times has actually made this big an improvement then Kudos, but keep it going.