We’ve noted here before the fancy footwork of New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, who can and does glissade with the agility of Ginger Rogers around the Times’ rules limiting anonymous quotes. Our favorite so far, as regular readers may recall, is an explanation from 14 months ago.
At the time — March of 2004 — Bumiller was describing President Bush’s eagerness to get into the campaign fray. “‘People are viewing him already as a candidate, so why should we muzzle one of our most effective voices in framing the debate?’ said a senior White House official who asked not to be named because he did not want to be pestered by reporters.” (Emphasis ours.)
Our first thought, then and now, was that the news that Bush was eager to hit the campaign trail hardly ranked as an astonishing development, whether sourced by name or not. Our second thought was this: obviously, two interests were served here — those of the source who didn’t want a raft of reporters on his trail, and those of Bumiller, who didn’t want reporters not named Bumiller to get to said source. Our third thought was that it’s less clear whether the interests of the Times’ readers were, or are, served by this sort of coy tomfoolery. Since that time, the Times — and the Washington Post, for that matter — have repeatedly paid lip service to erasing anonymice from their pages — an effort that has largely failed. (We get the feeling nobody was trying very hard.)
So, today the Times is taking another stab. The paper released an internal committee report recommending ways to build reader confidence. Among the measures, as the Times’ Katharine Q. Seelye writes, is one more attempt to limit reliance on anonymous sources.
In the first irony of the week, the same day the committee report was released in New York, Bumiller, on the road with President Bush visiting Russian President Vladimir Putin, did it again.
In her dispatch today, Bumiller writes about the potential for awkward encounters among opposing world leaders attending a party hosted by Putin. Among the potential guests: North Korea’s Kim Jong Il, an international pariah. The rumor of Kim’s appearance turned out to be untrue, writes Bumiller, who quotes an anonymous source saying, “I don’t think he wants to be in the same city as the American imperialist who would contaminate him.”
And then, to keep the bosses at home happy, Bumiller throws in this explanation: “The official asked not to be identified because he did not want to be identified as insulting the leader of another country, even Mr. Kim.”
Which is just the latest imaginative variation on that old Times favorite, “my source asked not to be identified because he doesn’t want his words put in his mouth.”
Gotcha … we think.
–Susan Q. Stranahan
Susan Q. Stranahan wrote for CJR.