Shooing Anonymice?

Matt Welch | January 4, 2005

Your news organization's veracity -- and your ability to monitor it -- might soon be jacked up a notch or two, if some new sourcing guidelines quietly proposed by The Associated Press in December are approved by the AP's union. According to the document, which Editor & Publisher wrote about here,

[M]aterial from anonymous sources may be used only if:
1. The material is information and not opinion or speculation, and is vital to the news report.
2. The information is not available except under the conditions of anonymity imposed by the source.
3. The source is reliable, and in a position to have accurate information.

Further, reporters "should explain in the story why the source requested anonymity and, whenever possible, describe the source's motive for disclosing the information," and "must provide attribution that establishes the source's credibility; simply quoting 'a source' is not allowed." Articles containing anonymous sources must be run under a byline (AP dispatches frequently do not); they "must not say that a person declined comment when he or she is already quoted anonymously," and complaints about the anonymice's truthfulness must be processed pronto.

Why does this matter? The AP is the globe's dominant general-news service, "the largest and oldest news organization in the world," producing more of our news diet -- especially on foreign affairs -- than most people realize. Also, being a cooperative of leading news organizations, its practices can quickly become the industry norm (most newspaper copy-editing manuals, for example, derive from the AP Style Guide). As Jack Shafer and others have repeatedly pointed out, cracking down on the use of anonymous sources is one of the easiest journalistic reforms to announce, and one of the hardest to pull off. I've long argued that describing in as much detail possible why a source wishes to remain anonymous would bring important new details to a story (such as, "people who work for the government's X Dept. are terrified for their jobs, and/or are inveterate gossips"), and weed out much of the usage (such as my own) that's based on journalistic laziness. (Link via Howard Owens.)

Comments

|1.4.05 @ 10:53AM|#

Ha! I see it now:

AP reports: "A source inside the White House has stated that he regards the decision to invade Iraq as a mistake. (The source wishes to remain anonymous on the chance that criticizing the president could risk his job as the Secretary of State)"

|1.4.05 @ 11:47AM|#

Or what about the source being named, albiet fictious, and then stating, "Babba booey!"

|1.4.05 @ 12:06PM|#

Isn't this a trust issue? Either a reporter has a proven track record and has earned my trust, or not.

Bit stickier with pool reports or the kind of thing that appears in Time and Newsweek.

|1.4.05 @ 1:42PM|#

On paper this sounds like a useful reform. In practice it seems likely that none of the guidelines will be enforceable. It will probably only serve to give a veneer of respectability to the same old tricks reporters and sources have used for decades.

It is probably better for readers to simply disregard any anonymously-sourced information that cannot be independently verified.

drf|1.4.05 @ 4:11PM|#

"It is probably better for readers to simply disregard any anonymously-sourced information that cannot be independently verified."

good call - and generally being skeptical helps even when safe themes are discussed. after all, the reporters rarely are experts in their story (although some are).

cheers,
drf

|1.4.05 @ 8:31PM|#

drf said:
"after all, the reporters rarely are experts in their story (although some are)."

It's a Catch-22. The more expertise the reporter gets in the subject, the more biased toward a particular viewpoint he becomes. The rookie may not be sophisticated, and may not know when he's being played by his interviewees, but he rarely has a dog in the fight. The experienced journalist often does. Enter Bias, on his White Horse.

|1.4.05 @ 9:20PM|#

This is one of the reasons (I get it: Reason?) why I have abandoned newspapers and TV. In the rush to be first, such media sacrifice being right. Any correction is old news.

So I get my info from less popular magazines, like this one, a little later, but with more accuracy.

|1.5.05 @ 6:46AM|#

The AP page on Ask Jeeves' myway.com is a good, uncluttered source for many of the stories referenced on H&R, and without that annoying registration, too!

http://news.myway.com/index/id/home.html

Your Local Newspaper is likely to get most of its national and international coverage from AP, unless it is one of the few that has its own out-of-town or foreign bureaus.

Kevin