Its stylebook states that anonymous sources are to be used only as a “last resort,” but the New York Times may have a serious problem when it comes to on-the-record reporting.
The problem is too many unnamed sources.
Former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller said it’s a dilemma “because it contributes to the already substantial public mistrust of the news media. And it’s a problem because sometimes anonymity gives sources cover to take cheap shots.”
It’s a problem that isn’t going away any time soon, either.
“It’s not just laziness, though that is part of it. It’s become so deeply engrained in the culture of Washington and of politics writ large that it’s very hard to get candor or genuine insight on the record,” he told the Washington Examiner’s media desk.
Keller said that the issue shouldn’t be taken lightly and that major news groups, including the New York Times, need to think hard about the practice.
“About once a year, when I was executive editor, I declared war on the excessive use of anonymous sources, and I expect my successors will still be fighting that fight as long as there are things called newspapers,” he said.
But anonymous sourcing is neither a new problem at the Times, nor unique to the Grey Lady.
Media critic Steve Buttry said the Times’ generous use of unnamed sources is a problem that has been around for “decades.”
In fact, the New York Times even addressed this very issue nearly a decade ago, stating publicly that it would tighten its rules regarding unnamed sources.
And the trend towards nameless sources can be seen elsewhere in newsrooms across the U.S., the result of what Buttry and Keller say is a widespread disregard for a standard that once insisted everyone go on the record.
“Unnamed sources have been critical to lots of historically great reporting by the Times and other news organizations on such stories as Vietnam and Watergate and more recently on stories such as NSA spying and CIA prisons,” said Buttry, who is a Lamar Family Visiting Scholar at LSU’s Manship School of Mass Communication.
But “the creep of unnamed sources into stories that were less important or situations that weren’t essential to stories has been an issue for years,” he said.
Buttry and Keller are not alone in their worries over the Times’ use of unnamed sources.
New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan has gone to great lengths documenting the newspaper’s frequent citation of anonymous claims, detailing many of the the sourcing issues on the “AnonyWatch” blog.
“For many months now, I’ve been keeping track of the overuse of anonymous sources in the Times as a way of discouraging a practice that readers rightly object to. The practice continues apace — as do ever-more inventive reasons for granting anonymity,” she wrote in December.
“Anonymity continues to be granted to sources far more often than a last-resort basis would suggest,” she wrote in a separate blog post, adding that she has at times grown “tired of the sound of [her] own voice crying in the wilderness.”
Examples of anonymously sourced stories flagged by Sullivan include: Oddly cited criticism regarding New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s efforts to promote pre-kindergarten programs and an unsourced claim regarding the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370.
Elsewhere, Reuters’ Jack Shafer in a single week flagged 25 individual examples of Times reporters citing anonymous sources, some with good reason and others none.
*On Aug. 5, for example, the Times reported big dollars were in play during contract negotiations for the television show “The Big Bang Theory,” the Times report citing “people with knowledge of the outcome, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the negotiations were private.”
“Behind the scenes, labored negotiations may be governing who gets to speak anonymously in the paper, but from the outside it looks like the Times will give you a mask if you simply ask,” Shafer wrote.
ExaminerWhen asked why the New York Times appears to be working against the guidelines laid out in its own stylebook, Buttry told the Examiner: “Culture, inertia, gutless sources who aren’t sure of their facts or want to avoid accountability.”
It’s worth noting, however, that not everyone is on board in thinking that anonymous sourcing is a major problem for the New York Times. Indeed, according to Washington Post media reporter Erik Wemple, the notion that the New York Times’ use of unnamed sources is in some way unique seems dubious.
Wemple said he’s “seen some of the complaints, though I cannot be sure that the NYT uses anonymous sources at a rate that’s any more frequent than, say, the Washington Post, Politico or the Washington Examiner. What I am saying here is that anyone trying to find shaky examples of anonymous source usage can shop for them at just about any news site.”
And, although it’s difficult for writers and readers to determine which anonymous sources are “shaky,” there have been times when unnamed persons are contradicted entirely by knowledgeable on-the-record sources, the most recent being the New York Times’ anonymous sourcing on a story about North Korea’s supposed hacking of Sony Pictures.
These are the moments when the unnamed sources, and by extension the reporter, become highly dubious.
“It’s possible that this accountability is falling on the New York Times because it has the courage to employ an ombudsperson who’s taking a close look at it. How many other news organization do that?” he asked.
Elsewhere, Huffington Post media writer Jason Linkins took a middle approach: “I can’t really finger the New York Times in particular for having an anonymous sources problem. I work in Washington … anonymous sources are everywhere. Politico is a blizzard of anonymous sources.
“In general, do I think that anonymous sourcing gets abused by reporters? Sure. Am I surprised to see the criticism leveled at the [New York Times], from within and without? Not in the least. But it’s not unique to the New York Times and it’s not a new problem,” he told the Examiner.
He agreed with Buttry that unnamed sources have a habit of “creeping” into reporting, but suggested some journalists may also prefer to leave out source names in order to obscure their identity as somebody who is not necessarily in a position to know what they are talking about.
“[I]f we actually knew the identities of most of the people anonymously sourced in [campaign trail and congressional infighting stories], the reader would immediately recognize those people as being lame nobodies,” Linkins said. “The use of anonymity solely as a means of cloaking non-entities in a veil of perceived importance is crass, but the culture forgives it because the stories themselves are as disposable as used coffee grounds.
“But that culture creates a permissiveness, and the permissiveness leads to actual important stories that, at bottom, are playing fast and loose,” he said.
Linkins and Buttry believe it will take time before real changes are seen in newsrooms.
“It swings on a pendulum, between restraint and excess. The good thing that Steve Buttry is doing in this instance is to get the momentum swinging back in the other direction,” Linkis said. “We’ll probably never get to a point where the problem is ‘solved.’ ”
“I shouldn’t be surprised if the hatches didn’t get battened down somewhat, but over time, you can expect them to loosen again,” he added.
Buttry told the Examiner: “I think the Times is already addressing [the problem], as Margaret Sullivan has reported. But the response has been inadequate, as she and I have observed.”
Keller added that “much as I support the discipline of pressing to get information properly sourced, I would not want to work for — or read — a publication that banned the use of anonymous sources entirely.”
“It’s an essential tool of investigative reporting and, though it’s overused, it’s an indispensable tool for supplying depth and critical insight to complicated stories,” he said. “More important than attaching a name to a piece of information is establishing two facts about the source: Does the source actually know what he or she is talking about, and does the source have an ax to grind?”
