The enormity of the anonymous news source plague

The days when a person could pick up a newspaper or news magazine and be guaranteed that news sources are clearly identified are long gone, sad to say. Today, what former NBC News president Michael Gartner calls “the overuse, misuse and abuse of anonymous sources” has become so routine that reporters and editors often don’t even try to get important, sensitive news on the record.

But it’s not only the important stuff. Some practitioners of this particular dereliction of journalistic duty appear to operate on the principle that there is no story so innocuous that a source cannot be granted anonymity, no matter how ridiculous the result.

As Exhibit A, may it please the court, I offer a story from the Thursday morning sports pages about legendary race car driver Dale Earnhardt Sr., who was killed in a spectacular accident during Sunday’s Daytona 500 auto race. According to the story, Earnhardt had been laid to rest in private ceremonies at Kannapolis, N.C., “an Earnhardt company employee said, speaking on condition of anonymity.”

Really, now. On a need-for-secrecy level, we’re not exactly talking the Pentagon Papers case here, nor the Allied High Command’s plans for the invasion of Normandy. Tragic as the Earnhardt situation was, an objective reader would have to conclude that allowing some “company employee” to comment anonymously about the funeral was carrying things to the extreme.

The scourge is not limited to the sports pages. In the same Thursday newspaper, the national news briefs section provided another example of how the anonymous source has taken over even run-of-the-mill news articles. There, a story about the recent U.S.-British bombing of Iraqi air defense sites reported that the bombing damaged fewer than half of the targeted radars. This according to a “senior defense official … who discussed the Pentagon’s preliminary bomb damage assessment on condition of anonymity.”

On a daily basis, Page One of most any newspaper is a veritable gold mine of national stories rife with unattributed sources and faceless quotes. Take Thursday’s Clinton scandal du jour, for example – this one a tale of how attorney Hugh Rodham, Bill Clinton’s corpulent brother-in-law, had taken $400,000 for his alleged help in getting last-minute presidential pardons for an accomplished flim-flam artist and a major dope dealer.

Much of the information in this sad account of a good scam turned sour when exposed to the light of public scrutiny was attributed to “legal sources” or “a source close to Clinton,” or, when that wore thin, just plain old “sources” a half-dozen times. (Ironically, the richest part of the story was a paragraph actually attributed to a living, breathing source – Rep. Dan. Burton, R-Ind., long-time Clinton critic, chairman of the House committee investigating the pardons, and a man who appears to have had a sudden flash of insight as to just how the justice system works in this country. Calling the payments to Rodham “deeply troubling” and pledging to investigate them, Burton said, “This makes it look like there is one system of justice for those with money and influence, and one system of justice for everyone else”).

As though there isn’t.

My files contain other ludicrous examples of the faceless news source, the widespread use of which insidiously erodes the news media’s credibility. The items are datelined mostly Washington, D.C., of course, but also Tokyo and New York and Kabul, Afghanistan, and they all quote unidentified government officials who “spoke on condition of anonymity,”including one whose answer – so sensitive the person had to remain nameless – was “no comment.”

“At the highest levels of government nobody has a name,” syndicated columnist James J. Kilpatrick wrote several years ago in an article for the Washington Journalism Review. “The capital is inhabited almost entirely by ‘officials’ and ‘sources’ and ‘aides.'”

He called the pernicious practice “trust-me journalism,” and foresaw the epidemic escalating into a plague. He was right. It has. Where once readers were asked to accept something on faith only in the most unusual situations, now they are routinely asked to do so, putting us all pretty much on the slippery slope to hell. It’s depressing. Woe is me.

Still, even an old dawg schooled in the no-secrets school of journalism has to acknowledge that sometimes a case can be made for protecting a source by granting anonymity on even the most pedestrian of matters. On Monday, a local television station conducted Presidents’ Day street interviews, asking people to name their favorite president. One lady gushed, in all sincerity, that hers was Bill Clinton, “because he’s so honest.”

Talk about a quotation better left to wallow in anonymity.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.