Anonymity
Good column from Byron Calame on stupid uses of anonymous sources:
While many sources have long sought anonymity to disparage an opponent or enemy, the current White House can be found praising the president's decision-making anonymously. In a July 6 Times article about the year's first Supreme Court vacancy, "a senior White House official who spoke on condition of anonymity because most staff members are not authorized to speak about the vacancy" said that "at the end of the day, the president is going to decide this based on those principles, not from any pressure from the groups."
"What possible reason related to news can justify running this quote?" Jay Ackroyd of New York asked me in an e-mail message. "It's just spin." It also makes me feel uneasy. Puffery with the protection of anonymity can be used in pursuit of ends as devious as those sought through unattributed negative comments.
I genuinely don't understand why the papers don't put a stop to this. We're not talking about some struggling freelancer here or a staffer at a small-circulation magazine -- this is The New York Times. Surely, if the Times established a policy against printing anonymous spin, the White House would prefer putting nymous spin in the paper to simply letting the pages of the Times go unspun. If just a handful of other outlets -- The Washington Post, the Associated Press, the three TV networks -- did likewise, the whole system would collapse. Nobody seems to really believe this sort of anonymity is justifiably, and it really is in the power of editors to put a stop to it.
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Isn't this just a supply and demand issue?
There really are many more reporters in need of a story from the White House than insiders who can provide real information, given the general preference of editors and readers for 'sources' for news (rather than Krugman writing in Ted-Kaczynski-style isolation from the Washington mix).
Since scarsity favours the insiders, those insiders are capable of requiring journalists to put out their anonymous propaganda as part of the deal (the price, if you like) for giving them more interesting access on more interesting stories.
November 20, 2005 3:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
"What possible reason related to news can justify running this quote?" Jay Ackroyd of New York asked me in an e-mail message. "It's just spin."
As much as I wanted to agree, something bothered me. Of course, it's just spin, and the quote does not belong. But does that bear on the use of anonymous sources? Name him Dick Cheney, and it'd be the same disinformation. I honestly fear a crackdown on investigative journalism, which does have to find out what it can, and on leakers themselves, who may be the whistle blowers and real patriots. The real issue is stenography as journalism, accepting spin and contributing to the deception of the public.
November 20, 2005 5:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
Calame's "at the end of the day . . . ." was a poorly chosen example. No one has any difficulty identifying such an anonymous quotation as spin and indeed, fluff and silliness.
The problem news organizations have is in identifying when they ought to mediate for policy proponents marketing their policy choice to confederates in the Administration (okay?) or to the country (never).
November 20, 2005 5:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
Where do you hide a leaf? In the forest.
How do you disguise bluffs in poker? By making funny faces during each and every bid.
I can somehow see the value of anonimity. "Anonymous sources in Piotr's household confirm that he is the most caring and devoted husband and father" sound a bit better than "Piotr claims .blah blah while his wife and children refused to comment but goggled their eyes".
Why this manure graces our newspapers? I guess that there is some habit of custom of asking the subjects of a story for comments. Thus in many stories there are phrases like "X could not be reached, did not returned phone calls" etc. But what if X answered an inquiry but on a condition of anonymity? The stupid standard seems to be that if X simply refused to comment, it would be noted. Perhaps a more intelligent standard would be "X and his (her) people refused to comment other than anonymously."
November 20, 2005 6:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Part of the problem lies in the imperative journalists feel to use quotes, rather than simply characterizing what they've learned. In most pieces, an editor will give you a hard time if you go more than three paragraphs without a quote. It's also frowned upon to leave one entire side to a conflict without a quote; characterizing their views yourself isn't seen as acceptable. Sometimes the only voice you can get to present one side's spin is an anonymous one.
I actually don't think it's illegitimate to present spin in an article. The talking points being put out by each side are, themselves, part of the news. But they should be more clearly identified as such. In the article cited, the quote from the anonymous administration source is clearly not provided to tell us something about how the President will actually behave; it's supposed to tell us how the White House is currently playing the issue. If there were a designated section of each article set aside to provide the players' own highly biased spins on the issue, that would help distinguish between what the journalist presents as fact and what she presents as "he said/she said", and it would make the use of anonymous sources less problematic.
November 20, 2005 8:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Mathew,
I think you make an excellent point about anonymous spin but why not take it a step further and have the news media consider removing all spin. After all there is more than one type of spin such as the, whoops, I forgot to mention that part of the story spin.
Imagine an Island with a nuclear plant and people living on that island. Imagine one day something goes wrong and radioactive material is released into the air, ground and water. Imagine as a TV camera pans in on a small group of people protesting the leaks the news commentator fails to mention the leaks actually occurred. Hence a group of people who have every right to be concerned now look like a bunch of kooks. Look at the tree huggers; look at the tree huggers, aren’t they funny? Look at the funny people.
I suppose it is always good to question what we hear in the news but wouldn’t be nice if we didn’t have to question it quite so much and quite so often? Maybe the news media should pay us for working so hard to correct their news.
November 21, 2005 2:19 AM | Reply | Permalink
You have to remember the White House 'alternate reality' problem. The 'senior White House official' may have really and truly believed that he was supplying true and significant information to the reporter. The reporter presumably knew better, but his job is not to cause cognitive dissonance, but to get information. The fact that the lunatics are running the asylum is just one of those things that you have to deal with.
November 21, 2005 7:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
There's nothing wrong with including "spin" if it is the official position of the White House. When a paper prints, "Scott McClellan said the president never looks at polls and is only interested in what's best for the country," fine, that's the official line. A paper can't not print it, and readers can judge for themselves.
The problem with Anonyspin (tm) is that it appears to be the unofficial line, something sub rosa. A person is telling us something that he is not authorized to tell us. It would appear that there's an official line, and this is something different.
It's also often a lie. When someone is quoted offering the official line, and then we're told that they can't be named because they are not authorized to speak to the press, that's often obviously false: They're speaking to the press, they're giving the official line, they're probably authorized to do it.
I don't understand why reporters in such situations can't just say, "Look, you put your name on that blather, and I'll use it; if you won't stand behind it, it's useless."
November 21, 2005 8:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
Here's a suggestion: howzabout if some enterprising new org decides to start running a sort of "anonymity index" -- a chart or table giving at minimum offices/departments/positions (if not necessarily names) for each anonyrubric (tm) (e.g., "senior administration official" could have a list appended giving ... the entire list of senior administration officials -- or at least the titles of the positions to be considered as such).
This would be of immense help to readers AND would eliminate such hanky-panky as Calamity Judy Miller's agreeing to ID Scooter Libby as a "former hill aide": it would set up a clear system for reporters to use and for editors to check against.
More here:
http://croatan.blogspot.com
November 21, 2005 1:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
Clarification: hat should be "news org," not "new org."
As in, the WaPo decides to start doing this as policy, not a new crooks and liars/mediawatch/etc springs up to police the publications. (Although that wouldn't be a half-bad idea, either -- especially since the likelihood of a newspaper instituting this idea is slim to none.)
November 21, 2005 1:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
From a WaPo article about Azerbaijan this weekend: "We have indivisible interests here," a U.S. Embassy official said on condition of anonymity. "Security, democracy and energy."
They couldn't find anyone in either our embassy there, or in the appropriate section of the State Department in D.C., to go on the record with some silly boilerplate like that?! Sheesh.
I can see tough calls somewhere on the question of when to give a source anonymity, but granting anonymity for null-sounds is ridiculous.
November 21, 2005 2:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
As I said here the other day in a post about Bob Woodward, there's a simple rule about these things:
If the source's bosses won't have any heartburn when the source's words show up in the paper, then the reporter is being played and shouldn't grant anonymity.
That wasn't so hard, was it now?
If the source's bosses are going to be upset by what the source said, then that's why reporters protect their sources: because they could lose their jobs, or otherwise feel the ire of their superiors, if their names were known.
There may be some close calls here, but I bet you can read the next 100 anonymous quotes you see in the paper, and have no trouble figuring out which category >95 of them fall into.
November 21, 2005 2:19 PM | Reply | Permalink