UNNAMED SOURCES AS RHETORICAL CONSTRUCTS IN NEWS AGENCY REPORTS

Abstract

The paper is an in-depth study of the use of unnamed sources in the reports of two big, international news agencies, The Associated Press (AP) and Reuters. Traditionally, news agencies have referred to issues of “factuality” and “objectivity” as their valued objectives (see e.g. Boyd-Barrett, 1980; van Dijk, 1988), and as one claim to “factuality”, journalists tend to use a wealth of direct and indirect quotes in their reports, often coming from unnamed sources. From the point of view of news rhetoric, presenting an unnamed source as a credible and newsworthy speaker calls for special strategies. Sometimes journalists emphasize that the person quoted does not want to be named, and recently AP, in particular, has resorted more and more to explaining the reasons for anonymity. Though the news agencies themselves seem to think that all the strategies boosting the standing of an unnamed speaker, and the expressions stressing the anonymity, just give necessary information to the reader, it can be argued that they also open a wealth of rhetorical possibilities, and thus can undermine the alleged factuality/objectivity of news agency discourse.

Keywords:

• anonymity
• news agencies
• objectivity
• quotes
• rhetoric
• sources

Acknowledgements

The research was supported in part by the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence funding for the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English at the Department of English, University of Helsinki.

Notes

1. APME stands for “the Associated Press Managing Editors, an association of U.S. and Canadian editors whose newspapers are members of The Associated Press” (http://www.apme.com, accessed 25 July 2007). The AP news agency (=The Associated Press) is owned by 1500 US daily newspaper members, as the AP website states (http://www.ap.org/pages/about/about.html, accessed 25 July 2007). In the autumn of 2004, the APME credibility committee decided to make a study on unnamed sources, and for that purpose they chose one day in November 2004 and one day in February 2005 to check the stories from The Associated Press, Knight-Ridder Newspapers, the New York Times News Service and the Washington Post. The results of this survey generated many reactions from the members; for example, AP in June 2005 sent its staff a “reminder” about policy on unnamed sources.

2. See http://www.grammatics.com/appraisal, accessed 25 July 2007.

3. Collocations, according to Sinclair (1991, p. 170), are “the lexical co-occurrence of words”.

4. For a more detailed analysis on these expressions, see Stenvall (2004).

5. The chair of the APME credibility committee commented on a somewhat similar case in the New York Times as follows: “Readers understand that military officers aren't supposed to discuss classified material, and that's why they're anonymous. But on the flip side, should this story have said why the officers told secrets to a reporter? Wouldn't readers be interested in knowing their motivation?” (Buel, 2005).