Rampant anonymity in the daily news

A paragraph tucked into the Associated Press news story in Tuesday’s newspaper concerning Monday’s brief visit by Vice President Dick Cheney for a Maine Republican Party fund-raiser was on the one hand a hoot, and on the other hand a telling commentary on the news media’s abject capitulation to the forces of anonymity.

The story reported that Cheney had spoken mainly about national security issues and answered questions in an informal setting at a private fund-raising luncheon with about 50 Republican high rollers at a Cape Elizabeth waterfront home.

“At the request of the home’s owners, their names were not revealed,” the story reported, and I couldn’t have been the only reader who mused that he knew the vice president was an unpopular guy these days, but had never realized he was so out of favor with the masses that anyone would pass up bragging rights for having played host to the man. (Presumably, the 50 paying guests and Cheney knew in whose home they were assembled, although the story did not indicate as much.)

It’s no secret that the current administration in Washington loves to keep a secret. But really, now. There was a day not so long ago when, if a vice president of the United States was a guest in a private home, the proud homeowner would shout it from the rooftops, alert every newspaper and television station within 200 miles and lord it over his neighbors for the remainder of his life.

But the times they are a-changing, and not necessarily for the better – especially in the generous granting of anonymity to sources by a news media that appears to have forsaken the old Journalism 101 adage that names make news.

Check out most any news magazine and you’ll likely find more stuff attributed to anonymous sources than to people with actual names. Whereas those anonymous sources once were referred to as “a high State Department official,” or “a source close to the mayor” the practice is now to add a dubious justification for leaking incognito.

Thus, the source becomes “a high State Department official who did not wish to be seen as second-guessing his boss,” or “a source close to the mayor, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.”

As though the qualifying term gives the reader more confidence that the source can be trusted; that there is, in fact, a bona fide source at all, as compared to one made of whole cloth by an unsupervised reporter with a grand imagination and a copy desk inclined to funnel his stuff into the newspaper loosely edited.

The possibilities for mischief in the system bring to mind the escapades of “the fabulous Wenlock Jakes,” a fictional American newspaper reporter in the late British satirist Evelyn Waugh’s book “Scoop,” considered a cult classic in the newspaper business.

When Jakes turns up in a place to cover a story “you can bet your life that as long as he’s there it will be the news center of the world,” Waugh wrote. Jakes was known to his friends as the perceptive genius who had scooped the world with an eyewitness story of the sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania four hours before she was hit by a German U-boat off the Irish coast.

A Waugh character tells his newsroom mates of the time Jakes went out to cover a revolution in one of the Balkan capitals: “He overslept in his carriage, woke up at the wrong station, didn’t know any different, got out, went straight to a hotel and cabled off a thousand-word story about barricades in the streets, flaming churches, machine guns answering the rattle of his typewriter as he wrote, a dead child, like a broken doll, spreadeagled in the deserted roadway below his window – you know.

“Well they were pretty surprised at his office, getting a story like that from the wrong country, but they trusted Jakes and splashed it in six national newspapers. …”

The result was predictable. Every newspaper in Europe, vowing not to be further scooped by Jakes, rushed reporters to the scene.

“They arrived in shoals. Everything seemed quiet enough, but it was as much as their jobs were worth to say so, with Jakes filing a thousand words of blood and thunder a day. So they chimed in, too. Government stocks dropped, financial panic, state of emergency declared, army mobilized, famine, mutiny – and in less than a week there was an honest to God revolution under way, just as Jakes had said. There’s the power of the press for you. …”

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