Last fall, when Clark Hoyt, the public editor of The New York Times, spoke to Professor Richard Wald’s Critical Issues in Journalism class at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, he presented the idea of a research project to evaluate how closely reporters adhere to the newspaper’s anonymous-sources policy.

Drawing on his experience as a former D.C. bureau chief of Knight Ridder, Hoyt defended the need for anonymity to protect sources who, fearing reprisal, might not otherwise come forward. But Hoyt also criticized hurried reporting that abuses anonymous sourcing for the sake of the big scoop.

Anonymous sources have long served as the anchors for many investigative stories. In 2005, for instance, The Washington Post’s Josh White broke news of the possible detention of “ghost” prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The Post’s coverage supplemented information from military documents, with disclosures from unnamed prison guards and “Defense Department officials,” to report on the illicit confinement of unlisted prisoners in Iraq by the American military and the CIA.

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