Anonymous source still anonymous

When Newsweek magazine, citing an anonymous source, reported on May 9 that American guards at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had attempted to rattle Muslim prisoners there by desecrating the Quran, reaction was immediate.

Riots that broke out in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world were blamed on the report that the Muslim holy book had been defiled, and the magazine’s unimpeachable government source began having second thoughts about his role in the flap.

Sorry about that, he told the author of the piece. I know you believe you understood what you thought I said. But I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant…

In its next issue, Newsweek, under immense pressure from the Pentagon and elsewhere, issued a retraction. The source was someone with credibility “and in a position to know the things he was telling us,” a spokesman explained in the retraction. Still, live by the anonymous source, die by the anonymous source. The magazine would take responsibility.

Along with the retraction came an apology and a determined vow to rely far less on anonymous sources in the future. An anonymous source would be used only after all other avenues had been exhausted, and only after authorization by one or more adult supervisors in the newsroom. (My translation.)

Well, hallelujah. As one who has long whined about the overuse, misuse and abuse of anonymous sources in news stories, I just might live to see the day when the source story no longer “allows manipulators to lie, strategists to float trial balloons, and willing journalists to impress their peers at the expense of their credibility,” as former NBC executive Michael Gartner once put it in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece.

Alas. Old habits die hard. Recent editions of Newsweek magazine show that nothing much has changed in the old anonymous-source game.

Granted, the abomination has been dressed in spiffy new duds in a desperate attempt to gain respectability. Whereas in pre-Guantanamo fiasco days, the reporter might have written simply that so-and-so spoke “on condition of anonymity,” today he is more apt to write that the source “spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of his position.” But despite the tacked-on justification for the practice it’s still the same old anonymous source, up to its same old anonymous mischief in asking the reader to accept something on faith.

In the magazine’s July 7 edition the new-look anonymous sources in a story about potential Supreme Court nominations by President Bush included “a conservative strategist who insisted on anonymity because he didn’t want to harm his relationship with the White House,” and “a leading Republican lawyer, who declined to be identified because he is a member of the White House sales team.”

In a story about the problems facing Bush adviser Karl Rove as a result of his alleged outing of covert CIA undercover agent Valerie Plame in a Time magazine story, the anonymous citations included: “a source intimately familiar with Time’s editorial handling of the story, but who has asked not to be identified because of the magazine’s corporate decision not to disclose its contents,” and “a source close to Rove, who declined to be identified because he did not wish to run afoul of the prosecutor or government investigators.”

Well, duh. Who would? If that should become the standard for granting anonymity to a news source, may God help us.

Although Newsweek appears to have invented the genre, this latest trend to rationalize the continuing use of the anonymous source by offering a more detailed explanation is beginning to appear in other publications and in news wire service copy.

I tinkered with a couple of stories that ran earlier this week in Your Favorite Daily Newspaper to illustrate what form the scourge might take should it infect local reporting:

. “Gov. John Baldacci has resurrected at least part of the plans for a north-south highway through Aroostook County, according to a source who asked not to be identified because he is hatching a scheme to fleece taxpayers when the state comes calling, checkbook in hand, to purchase the portion of the proposed right of way that traverses his property…”

. “Relief from the sweltering heat that has plagued Maine should come today in the form of a cooler, drier air mass, according to a weather forecaster who declined to be identified because of an unpleasantry that occurred last January when the snow ‘flurries’ he had predicted arrived disguised as a three-day blizzard…”

Sudden thought: If it eliminates the anonymous source, this may be an idea whose time has come.

Columnist Kent Ward’s e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.