Is Crackdown on Anonymous Sources Going Too Far?

By: Joe Strupp Congress takes up the proposal federal shield law for journalists this week, and not a moment too soon. For months, critics have been battering journalists harder than a hurricane on the Florida coast over their use of anonymous sources.

Reporters Matthew Cooper and Judith Miller lost one court fight after another, and the latter ended up in jail for refusing to divulge a source. White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan blasted reporters' reliance on unnamed sources as Washington correspondents pressed him to end background-only briefings. New polls showed growing reader opposition to anonymous sourcing, while newspapers scrambled to revise -- or at least explain -- their policies on such use. On the popularity scale, anonymous sources ranked somewhere between steroid-engorged ballplayers and IRS agents.

Even the return of the most famous confidential source of all, Deep Throat (in the living form of W. Mark Felt), could not turn the tide, despite the reminder of the positive contributions that such sources can make.

And so, as Congress considers a shield law and one reporter sits in jail in Virginia, the questions remain: Is it good or bad that news organizations are tightening controls on such attribution with new rules urging their limited use and demanding more specific descriptions of sources? And what will the outcome of the Plame case, both in the courts and in the court of public opinion, mean to the most sensitive of journalistic tools?

Industry leaders believe the decline in anonymous sourcing will continue, but also are concerned about where that happy medium will rest once the dust settles. "It's good to bleed journalism of the sloppy sourcing, it gives more weight to proper usage," says Kathleen Carroll, senior vice president and executive editor of the Associated Press. "But I don't think there will be a point when we brush our hands together and say, 'there, we're done.'

Indeed, there is debate on this issue. Some say the crackdown is overdue, while others defend the use of confidential sources as a necessary tool and fear that too many restrictions could hurt coverage.

"It is dangerous when you start saying never [to anonymous sourcing] because you can lose stories," says Bill Kovach, chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists and a former longtime editor. "A straight blackout is dangerous for our society, but so is careless use."

Mike McGraw, a 30-year reporter at the Kansas City Star and a member of its investigative team, agrees. "I hate absolute policies," he says. "I hope the backlash doesn't cause newspapers to say 'never' under any circumstances."

Warren Strobel, a Knight Ridder correspondent whose beat includes military affairs and intelligence, stresses that stories based on confidential sources are just as acceptable as those on the record if the sources are good, more so if they are numerous. One example is a June 3 report he co-wrote that debunked earlier reports of terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi planning Iraq bombings from Syria. Most of the story relied on unnamed sources, but included several of them. "We had three different sources saying the same thing, and there was no other way to report the story," Strobel explains. "Some stories you just can't do without them."

For the San Francisco Chronicle's Mark Fainaru-Wada, who with Lance Williams broke the BALCO steroid scandal by using leaked secret grand jury testimony, such sourcing is a necessity. "To believe you could do a lot of this work without anonymous sources is naive," he says.

Some defenders of anonymous sources say the benefits are not just in direct reporting, but also in gaining an understanding of an issue. "I bounce ideas off of them and ask if I am heading in the right direction," says Richard Tomkins, a UPI White House reporter whose technique mirrors that of Woodward and Bernstein's use of Deep Throat. "A lot of people are not willing to talk on the record." Tomkins referenced a story several months ago he wrote about a change in U.S. policy toward Syria, which he filed after asking several White House sources what they thought of the angle. "They said, 'go for it,' and it was on the button," he adds.

The 'Newsweek' Effect

Clearly, however, the trend has been toward less anonymous sourcing, editors and reporters say, even before the Newsweek flap. Most newsrooms remain increasingly skeptical of confidential reporting, and are adamant that reporters get information on the record. A survey of 419 newsroom leaders in early June by the Associated Press Managing Editors found that 103 respondents -- nearly one in four of those polled -- said they never allow anonymous sources in their publications, with most of them from smaller or mid-sized papers. "Over the last 10 years, we have not used a single anonymous source," Ana Walker, editor of the Longview (Texas) News-Journal, told the surveyors. "We might as well be writing fiction if we can't give our readers a source."

Nearly all of the nation's major newspapers and news services have either rewritten their policies on sourcing, or at least reminded journalists of their existence -- and those on the beat say the message is clear: Back off!

"It has had an effect," says Susan Page, a White House correspondent for USA Today, which instituted a tighter policy last year requiring that all confidential sourcing receive approval from a managing editor. "We are clearly trying to use them only when there is no other way to get the story. It just means you have to go back to people and get it on the record."

The reasons are well documented. A string of incidents, from the 2003 leak of former CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity to the "60 Minutes" Bush National Guard episode to the Newsweek foul-up, are feeding criticism of confidential sourcing. Add to that increasing competition from 24-hour news channels, a growing community of news and gossip Web sites, and bloggers that have already proven they can break news and catch others' mistakes, and it means reporters are finding that questions surrounding the use of anonymous sources are harder than ever to answer.

The New York Times was one of the first to institute an anonymous sourcing policy. Composed in February 2004, in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, the guideline requires at least one editor to know the identity of an anonymous source, and demands that the source have direct knowledge of the information given. Several months later, The Washington Post developed a similar policy of editor notification, while also stating, "we must be reluctant to grant" anonymity to sources.

In May, the Times released an ethics report detailing a number of recommendations. One section includes new anonymous source guidelines declaring that reporters "must be more aggressive in pressing sources to put information and quotations on the record," while also urging that they "be more diligent in describing sources more fully."

USA Today put its new policy in place a year ago and created the position of standards editor, who tracks the use of such sources. Editor Ken Paulson implemented the policy shortly after taking over the paper from former editor Karen Jurgensen, who resigned in April 2004 due to the Jack Kelley scandal. Paulson claims the crackdown reduced anonymous sourcing by 75%. "You cannot live up to your watchdog role unless you occasionally use sources who are afraid to speak out," he says. "But the key is to ensure that what we do, we have faith in."

For several years in the 1980s, USA Today allowed no anonymous sourcing, an edict still favored by founder Al Neuharth. In his column, Neuharth recently wrote, "Anonymous sources generally are cowards, who often tell more than they know."

Striking a Balance

Several studies indicate that use of anonymous sourcing is down. The Project for Excellence in Journalism, in its "State of the News Media" report released in March, revealed that anonymous sources were used in only 7% of newspaper stories, and 13% of those on Page One (down from 29% a year earlier). The study reviewed 16 dailies of various sizes on 28 randomly selected days between January and September 2004.

A more recent review from the Center for Media and Public Affairs comparing coverage of the Reagan administration's first year with the first year of George W. Bush's presidency found the use of anonymous sources had dwindled by 33% among several major papers and network outlets.

Amy Mitchell, associate director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, says the drop in anonymous sourcing came about only after a sharp rise in the 1990s. "News organizations became a little more lax in their oversight, the sources gained more control, and were able to demand anonymity more," she says. "Reporters were in more need for information, there was more competition, and sources saw they could demand it -- and they did." She says the pinnacle of abuse came during the Monica Lewinsky scandal when "entire stories based on anonymous sources and quoting other news organizations were running without original reporting."

When the ethics scandals hit just a few years later, the backlash began. "We needed to have a pretty firm pulling back before we could find balance," Mitchell says. "I think we are still working on it. The verification balance is not there, but there are positive signs in pulling back."

Another survey from the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center shows readers strongly question anonymous sourcing. The report, released May 24, polled 1,500 people, with 89% agreeing that news stories relying on anonymous sources should be questioned for accuracy, while 53% said such stories should not be published at all. Yet most agreed that journalists need protection from government interference on such issues, with 59% believing that journalists should not disclose confidential sources if ordered by a court, and 56% in support of a federal shield law.

"The anonymous-sourcing issue that has become so prominent today has less to do with the use of sources and more to do with the lack of understanding on the part of the public about how and why anonymous sources are used," says Aly Col?n, an instructor at The Poynter Institute. Sometimes, Colon explains, neither the press nor the public can distinguish between those anonymously sourced stories that are worth something, and those that are not.

Never Say Never Again

Still, not everyone is so gung-ho to do away with anonymous sourcing, especially inside the Beltway. "You should never say never because every case is different," says Ron Hutcheson, a White House correspondent for Knight Ridder and outgoing president of the White House Correspondents Association. "If you have something that is rock solid [based on an anonymous source], you should report it."

Hutcheson cites a 2002 story he wrote that revealed Bush planned to provide more grants to "faith-based" charities. "I had no doubt it would happen, and it did happen," he says. Today, he adds, there would be more newsroom debate about the confidential sourcing "and I would have to argue more for using it."

Dana Priest, who covers intelligence and national security for the Washington Post, stresses the need for anonymous sourcing on her beat, which she contends is so sensitive that on-the-record comments are almost nonexistent. "Most everything I write about is something the government doesn't want people to know about," Priest says. "About 90% of the people I talk to not only don't want to be identified by name, but sometimes not even as a U.S. intelligence official."

She points to a story in late December, which relied on unnamed sources, about the cost of a new spy satellite program that had nearly doubled from $5 billion to $9.5 billion. "There should not be black and white lines [on sourcing] or you won't get those stories," she declares. "This is the value of anonymous sourcing."

Priest adds that the Post's policy and other pressures against anonymous sourcing have prompted her to offer a more descriptive attribution of sources, and a longer explanation of why they do not want to be on the record. The satellite story described the source as "one official, who, like others, talked about the program and the debate on the condition of anonymity because of the project's sensitivity." In another story in March about CIA treatment of prisoners in a secret prison in Afghanistan, Priest made clear that the story was based on four unnamed sources. She described them as "U.S. government officials aware of the case."

Overall, the pressure to avoid such sourcing is fine, "because the media should try as hard as it can to tell the public everything it can about a story," Priest says. "The onus is on the reporter who uses anonymous sources to make sure it is right."

Ed Chen, a veteran White House correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, says the new demands of on-the-record sourcing are making life difficult, using the recent coverage of the Capitol Hill filibuster fight as an example. Some sources refused to be identified "as even 'a leadership aide in the Senate.' Just as 'an aide,'" he says. Chen adds that he now tries harder to get people on the record, "but my success rate is not something to write home about."

A Welcomed Improvement?

But most of those reporters and editors who spoke for this story say the new push for better sourcing and more on-the-record attribution is a welcomed improvement. "You would be surprised to see how often sources roll over when you point out the quotes you want to use," says Sandy Johnson, Washington, D.C. Chief of Bureau for the Associated Press, which has had an anonymous sourcing policy for 10 years that requires manager approval and allows it only for news, not opinion. "The culture has to change, and we are seeing some small changes."

Mark Silva, a Chicago Tribune White House reporter, agrees, saying he disdains off-the-record comments and complains that Washington has a surplus of anonymous sources. "I don't like the lack of accountability," he explains, noting he rarely, if ever, uses them. "Readers deserve to know where information is coming from."

Silva admits that he has had to sit on stories based on unnamed sources that ended up being true, because he felt the attribution wasn't transparent enough. He points to a February item he came across about a soon-to-be-announced White House program, which he declined to identify. "I had documentation on the information that was about to be revealed, and it was eventually revealed," Silva says. "I would have had to identify where it came from and could not. It was not some earth-shattering story and I waited. I spoke to my editors and the reaction was that I was right to wait."

But sometimes the push for on-the-record sourcing pays off, reporters say. Adam Nagourney, a political reporter for the New York Times, says he had much more luck getting people on the record during last year's presidential race than he had in past campaigns. "Ten years ago, there would have been more anonymous quotes," Nagourney says about his coverage of John Kerry, noting one story about criticism of Kerry's strategies that had no anonymous comments. "We had about 20 people on the record. The culture has changed and reporters are pushing to put more people on the record."

Nagourney's Times colleague Elizabeth Bumiller, who covers the White House and pens the paper's weekly "White House Letter," agrees. She says a recent story on the Bush administration included a source who had initially wanted to be off the record. "I said, 'this is a good quote, can't you go on the record?' and he did," she recalls. "In the last year, we have been pressed more and more by editors to get things on the record, and I am all for that."

Another time, she used a source but carefully described the person in print as someone "who didn't want to be named because they did not want to be identified as talking about possible motives of the White House" -- a bit lengthy, but far more specific.

For other reporters outside of Washington, even those on the investigative beat, using anonymous sources is a rarity in today's climate. "You just don't do it," says Mike Wilkinson, an investigative reporter with The Blade in Toledo who has gained notice for a never-ending expose of a coin-selling scandal involving state officials and political fundraisers. He adds, "I can't recall a story where it was supported by anonymous sources. I don't find it constrictive."

Getting Scotty on the Beam

While many reporters are willing to cut back on using confidential help, they also want the White House to do the same. Earlier this year, a group of seven D.C. bureau chiefs fed up with government briefings that were required to be off the record met with Press Secretary Scott McClellan and urged that he put an end to such events. In addition, the group sent an e-mail to several dozen other Washington bureau chiefs asking that when their reporters attend a background-only briefing, they ask that it be on the record and demand to know why it is not.

"I think we are making some headway," says the AP's Johnson, one of those who spearheaded the protest and acknowledged fewer off-the-record briefings since it began.

Hutcheson of Knight Ridder says the background briefings had gotten so bad that he refused to quote anything from one in April held prior to a Bush energy speech. It included three White House officials, all demanding to be unidentified. "That was a marker, a low point in their use of anonymous briefings," Hutcheson says. "That pushed me over the edge, and I would not write about it."

But most reporters admit that the situation has recently improved and credit McClellan with listening to their concerns. "I think it is encouraging," says Page of USA Today. "Briefings are on the record now, unless there is a compelling reason not to be."

Another, larger concern related to anonymous sourcing remains unresolved, however: The continued demands from federal officials for their identities.

The most well known, of course, is the Valerie Plame case, in which federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is seeking information about who leaked the identity of the former CIA agent to several journalists. Although columnist Robert Novak first published her identity, Fitzgerald has focused on Matthew Cooper of Time magazine and the New York Times' Judith Miller, ordering them to reveal their sources. Both have been held in contempt and ordered to jail for refusing to divulge the information, but have avoided doing so while the U.S. Supreme Court considers taking on the matter.

At the same time, several other cases have resulted in reporters either being subpoenaed or formally asked to turn over sources. The recent string of investigations has prompted a proposed federal shield law, which is currently being considered by a House committee. Clearly, all of these activities are putting anonymous source protection at risk, and may very well cause many potential sources to back off.

"If the [Plame] case goes to the Supreme Court and they render a decision that goes against the press, in the short term, everyone will be a lot more careful" in using anonymous sources, says Poynter's Aly Colon. "If it goes the other way, it would be a big mistake to go overboard [using anonymous sources], which might happen." Adds Page of USA Today, "I'm very concerned that it is going to have a chilling effect."

While Cooper declined to comment, Miller says bluntly that the federal court actions may eventually scare sources into drying up: "Without these people coming forward, people are not going to find out information they need," she tells E&P.

Safety vs. the 'Big Break'

So where do we go from here? For most news organizations, the recent events will continue to curtail anonymous sourcing when possible, which appears to be a good thing overall. But if the courts and federal investigators keep up their high-pressure tactics, or editors go too far in limiting such sourcing, important news may not get out, others fear.

"We have painted ourselves into this corner as a profession, and I believe anonymous sourcing has been overused," says David Boardman, managing editor of The Seattle Times and president of IRE. "We used them far too much when it wasn't necessary, and in some slippery ways." He says the industry has to show, through policies and practice, it is being responsible: "We need to be more transparent as a business."

Irwin Gratz, president of the Society of Professional Journalists, agrees: "I have no idea where it's going to wind up, but I think we are getting to a better place. News organizations are taking some good, aggressive steps."

Still, a balance must be struck. While USA Today deserves credit for cutting back on anonymous sources, David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, asked recently, "How many national-security stories has USA Today broken?"

For the lessons of Deep Throat to have a positive effect, reporters and editors need to remember the basics, says Ben Bradlee: "Use them only as a last resort and try for maximum identification of the source, as long as you can't get it any other way."

Bob Woodward, who spoke while rushing to get his upcoming Deep Throat book finished, believes the ends can often justify the means if secret sources aren't abused. If papers get good results from anonymous sourcing, he declares, "people will see that it can work. It all depends on that."