Yesterday, New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent turned his attention to one of Campaign Desk’s pet peeves — stories so anonymously sourced that the reader throws up his hands in exasperation at the endless parade of analysts…experts…advisors… sources close to the investigation…lawyers involved in the case…party strategists…former spooks no longer with the agency…persons close to the candidate…sources who have seen the minutes of the board meeting…in short, all the “standardized obfuscations that can make a morning with the Times so exasperating,” as Okrent puts it.
This isn’t a New York Times problem alone, of course, nor is it a problem limited to campaign reporting. It’s endemic in the American press, but it’s especially inimical in Washington, where there is scarcely a reporter who isn’t a carrier of the virus. So, to that extent, what Okrent reports on his own newspaper’s shortcomings often applies across the board.
Okrent reminds us that last February, the Times promulgated a new policy intended to crack down on the flagrant use of anonymous sources by its reporters. Lo and behold, a little after that, Okrent ran across one Jason B. Williams, a New York University journalism student writing a master’s thesis on anonymous sources in the Times. Williams had found last December that 40 percent of the articles in the Times’ A-section invoked unidentified sources.
The Times’ new, tougher policy tasked reporters using anonymous sources with “an obligation not only to convince the reader of their reliability, but also to convey what we can learn of their motivation.” So Okrent commissioned Williams to study all the editions of the New York Times printed in April to see if the new policy has been worth a bucket of warm spit.
The answer, alas, is a resounding “No!”
Williams survey of April stories in the Times found that barely 2 percent of stories citing anonymous sources revealed why the Times granted the request for anonymity and only 8 percent of unidentified sources “were described in a meaningful fashion.” Ouch.
All this is enough for the exasperated Okrent to throw down a challenge:
“Finally, it’s worth reconsidering the entire nature of reportorial authority and responsibility. In other words, why quote anonymous sources at all? Do their words take on more credibility because they are flanked with quotation marks?” If reporters were to write their articles in their own voice, “eschewing all blind quotes and meaningless attributions and making only the assertions they were confident were true,” Okrent writes, “we could hold someone responsible for the accuracy; not the dubious sources, but the writers themselves. Isn’t that the way it ought to be?”
Hey — it works for us.
–Steve Lovelady
Steve Lovelady was editor of CJR Daily.