Anonymous Sources: A Historical Review of the Norms Surrounding Their Use

Abstract

This article offers a historical examination of the journalistic norms surrounding the practice of citing anonymous sources. The author examines a variety of textbooks, guidebooks, trade press coverage, and codes of ethics over the past century. The analysis reveals that unnamed attribution, once scorned as a journalistic practice, has gained acceptance over time. After scandals revolving around unnamed sourcing from the 1980s to the 2000s, journalistic norms surrounding their use crystalized in the late 2000s. This analysis also finds that journalism textbooks more often describe common practices of journalists rather than provide normative statements as to how journalists should act. The analysis also reveals that, in guidelines and texts, the journalistic tradition of independently verifying information from unnamed sources diminished over time.

Notes

William B. Blankenburg, “The Utility of Anonymous Attribution,” Newspaper Research Journal 13, no. 1/2 (1992): 10–23; Zachary Coile, “Watergate Case Shows Value of Anonymous Sources,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 1, 2005; William L. Rivers, News in Print: Writing and Reporting (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).

David E. Boeyink, “Anonymous Sources in News Stories: Justifying Exceptions and Limiting Abuses,” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 5, no. 4 (1990): 233; Matt Duffy and Carrie Freeman, “Unnamed Sources: A Utilitarian Exploration of Their Justification and Guidelines for Limited Use,” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 26, no. 4 (December 2011): 311; Steve Weinberg, The Reporter's Handbook: An Investigator's Guide to Documents and Techniques, 3rd ed. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996).

Andrew Alexander, “For the Post, Anonymous Sources Remain a Problem,” Washington Post, June 13, 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/11/AR2010061104313.html; Andrew Alexander, “Post Often Ignores Its Own Rules on Anonymous Sources,” Washington Post, August 16, 2009, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/14/AR2009081401928.html; Clark Hoyt, “Cloaked Identities, Even with Names,” New York Times, August 16, 2009, sec. Opinion, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/opinion/16pubed.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss; Clark Hoyt, “Culling the Anonymous Sources,” New York Times, June 8, 2008, sec. Opinion, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/opinion/08pubed.html; Clark Hoyt, “Those Persistent Anonymous Sources,” New York Times, March 22, 2009, sec. Opinion, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/opinion/22pubed.html.

Hamilton Nolan, “New York Times Warns Newsroom on Anonymous Sources,” Gawker, September 1, 2010, para. 17, http://gawker.com/5627330/new-york-times-warns-newsroom-on-anonymous-sources.

Al Neuharth, “Evil of Journalism: Anonymous Sources,” USA Today, January 16, 2004.

Ibid., 8.

Leonard Downie Jr., “The Guidelines We Use to Report the News,” Washington Post, March 7, 2004, B1.

Ibid.

See, for example, Alicia Shepard, “Anonymous Sources,” American Journalism Review, December 1994; Boeyink, “Anonymous Sources in News Stories.”

Stephen Bates, “Overruling a Higher Court: The Goodale Gambit and Branzburg v. Hayes,” Chapman's Journal of Law & Policy 14 (2009): 17.

William E. Lee, “Deep Background: Journalists, Sources, and the Perils of Leaking,” American University Law Review 57 (2008): 1453.

Mark J. Rozell, Media Power, Media Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 330.

Rozell, Media Power, Media Politics, 300.

Matt Duffy and Ann Williams, “Use of Unnamed Sources Drops from Peak in 1960s and 1970s,” Newspaper Research Journal 32, no. 4 (2011): 6–21. The analysis looked at a generalizable sample of one year of coverage in ten-year intervals (1958, 1968, 1978, 1988, 1998, and 2008). A total of 1,283 front-page articles were examined.

Ibid.

Boeyink, “Anonymous Sources in News Stories,” 235.

William B. Blankenburg, “The Utility of Anonymous Attribution,” Newspaper Research Journal 13, no. 1/2 (1992): 11.

Taegyu Son, “Leaks: How Do Codes of Ethics Address Them?,” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 17, no. 2 (June 2002): 170.

Duffy and Freeman, “Unnamed Sources,” 311.

“Whistle-blower” stories were deemed credible regardless of sourcing, but personal allegation stories were considered less credible if they relied on unnamed sources. Ron F. Smith, “Impact of Unnamed Sources on Credibility Not Certain,” Newspaper Research Journal 28, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 8–19.

Miglena Mantcheva Sternadori and Esther Thorson, “Anonymous Sources Harm Credibility of All Stories,” Newspaper Research Journal 30, no. 4 (Fall 2009): 54–66.

Ibid., 63.

Ibid.

Victoria Smith Ekstrand and Cassandra Imfeld Jeyaram, “Our Founding Anonymity: Anonymous Speech during the Constitutional Debate,” American Journalism 28, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 35–60.

Ibid., 53.

Blankenburg, “The Utility of Anonymous Attribution”; Shepard, “Anonymous Sources.” See Blankenburg's argument or Carl Bernstein's points in Shepard's article. Both argue that benefits to the public from the increased information provided by offering anonymity outweigh any reduction in news credibility.

John La Porte Given, Making a Newspaper (New York: H. Holt, 1907); Grant Milnor Hyde, Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence: A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of Newspaper Writing (New York: Appleton, 1912); William Shipman Maulsby, Getting the News (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925); Albert Frederick Henning, Ethics and Practices in Journalism (New York: R. Long & R. R. Smith, 1932).

American Society of Newspaper Editors, “Canons of Journalism,” 1922, http://www.scribd.com/doc/19499595/Canons-of-Journalism-ASNE-Code-of-Ethics-1922.

F. Fraser Bond, An Introduction to Journalism: A Survey of the Fourth Estate in All Its Forms (New York: Macmillan, 1955).

John Hohenberg, The Professional Journalist: A Guide to Modern Reporting Practice (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960).

The column ran from 1932 to 2004 under the direction of first Pearson and then Anderson.

Douglas A. Anderson and Dan Pingelton, “Examination of the Content of the ‘Washington Merry-Go-Round,’” Newspaper Research Journal 3, no. 3 (April 1982): 46.

James L. Aucoin, “The Re-Emergence of American Investigative Journalism, 1960–1975,” Journalism History 21, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 3.

Hohenberg, The Professional Journalist.

Ibid., 227.

Ibid., 228.

Ibid.

Ibid., 230.

Ibid., 231.

Hohenberg gained fame as a national and international correspondent and later as a professor of journalism at Columbia University. He also served as head of the Pulitzer Committee and authored more than twenty journalism books. See Doug Martin, “John Hohenberg, 94, Former Pulitzer Prize Official, Dies,” New York Times, August 8, 2000, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/08/nyregion/john-hohenberg-94-former-pulitzer-prize-official-dies.html.

Daniel Okrent, “Weapons of Mass Destruction? Or Mass Distraction?,” New York Times, May 30, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/30/weekinreview/the-public-editor-weapons-of-mass-destruction-or-mass-distraction.html; Boeyink, “Anonymous Sources in News Stories”; Jack Shafer, “The Post Declares War on Anonymice,” Slate, March 8, 2004; Sternadori and Thorson, “Anonymous Sources Harm Credibility of All Stories”; Shepard, “Anonymous Sources”; Alicia Shepard, “NPR's Giffords Mistake: Re-Learning the Lesson of Checking Sources,” NPR.org, January 11, 2011, http://www.npr.org/blogs. ombudsman/2011/01/11/132812196/nprs-giffords-mistake-re-learning-the-lesson-of-checking-sources.

RonNell Andersen Jones, “U.S. Supreme Court Justices and Press Access,” Brigham Young University Law Review 2012 (January 1, 2012): 318–319.

Kermit L. Hall and Melvin I. Urofsky, New York Times v. Sullivan: Civil Rights, Libel Law, and the Free Press (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011).

John Prados and Margaret Pratt Porter, eds., Inside the Pentagon Papers, Modern War Studies (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004).

New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 US 713, 13 (US Supreme Court, 1971).

Chilton Rowlette Bush, Newswriting and Reporting Public Affairs, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1970).

Ibid., 90.

Ibid.

M. L Stein, Reporting Today: The Newswriter's Handbook (New York: Cornerstone Library, 1971), 83.

Ibid., 90.

Prior to this, SPJ and ASNE shared the same code of ethics.

Of course, a confidential source may simply lead a reporter toward attributable information. Therefore, the importance of keeping confidential sources secret does not necessarily connect to the use of anonymous sourcing. A reporter with a confidential source may not necessarily use an unnamed source in his or her reporting.

“Code of Ethics” (Society of Professional Journalists, 1973), para. 13.

See, for example, Mark Feldstein, Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington's Scandal Culture (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).

John Giuffo, “Watergate,” Columbia Journalism Review, November 2001, 74; Ellen Hume, “The Weight of Watergate,” Media Studies Journal 11, no. 2 (1997): 76; Michael Schudson, “Watergate: A Study in Mythology,” Columbia Journalism Review, May 1992, 28–33.

Michael W. Sheehy, “Study Examines Unnamed Source Policies at the Washington Post,” Newspaper Research Journal 31, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 84–96.

Herbert Strentz, News Reporters and News Sources: What Happens before the Story Is Written (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1978). Strentz reported that Bradlee required independent verification for any information attributed to unnamed sources. However, Sheehy (2010) cited evidence that the policy might not have been stated so explicitly. The editor who oversaw the Watergate reporting, Barry Sussman, said he doesn't remember actually having a “two-source rule.” He said that they always tried to corroborate information, but no rule regarding independent verification was set in stone. For more, see footnote 31 of Sheehy's 2010 study.

American Society of Newspaper Editors, “Statement of Principles,” 1975.

In Branzburg v. Hayes (1972), the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision ruled that compelling a journalist to disclose the identity of a confidential source was not a violation of First Amendment protections of the press. However, Justice Lewis Powell's concurring opinion indicated a belief that journalists’ right to withhold sources from the government did exist in some cases. Subsequent court rulings have since found both the right to keep sources concealed as well as the government's right to compel their disclosure. See, for example, Anthony L. Fargo, “What They Meant to Say: The Courts Try to Explain Branzburg v. Hayes,” Journalism & Communication Monographs 12, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 65–137; Pearlstine, Off the Record: The Press, the Government, and the War over Anonymous Sources.

For instance, William E. Burrows, On Reporting the News (New York: New York University Press, 1977).

Ibid., 177.

Strentz, News Reporters and News Sources, 68.

William L Rivers, News in Print: Writing and Reporting (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 197.

Ibid.

David Maraniss, “Post Reporter's Pulitzer Prize Is Withdrawn,” Washington Post, April 16, 1981.

Lee Banville, “The Janet Cooke Case,” Online NewsHour, June 19, 2006, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bradlee/background_cooke.html.

Jim Sibbison, “AP: The Price of Purity,” Columbia Journalism Review, November 1987, 56.

Ibid.

Norm Goldstein, ed., AP Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law (New York: Associated Press, 2004).

Ibid.

Stephen Lacy, “The Impact of Intercity Competition on Daily Newspaper Content,” Journalism Quarterly 65, no. 2 (Summer 1988): 399–406.

Doug Underwood, “When MBAs Rule the Newsroom,” Columbia Journalism Review, April 1988, 23–30.

S.D.M., “Competition Heats Up for Chicago News Efforts,” Broadcasting 119, no. 10 (September 3, 1990): 42.

Steven Brill, “Pressgate: What Makes the Media's Performance a True Scandal,” Brill's Content 1, no. 1 (August 7, 1998): 122–151.

Steven A. Esposito, “Anonymous White House Sources: How They Helped Shape Television News Coverage of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky Scandal,” Communications & the Law 21, no. 3 (1999): 17–18.

Ibid., 2.

Rem Reider, “The Jayson Blair Affair,” American Journalism Review, June 2003, http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=3019.

Dan Barry et al., “Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Deception,” New York Times, May 11, 2003, para. 1, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/national/11PAPE.html?ex=1367985600&en=d6f511319c259463&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND.

The Editors, “The Times and Iraq,” New York Times, May 26, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/international/middleeast/26FTE_NOTE.html.

Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller, “U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts,” The New York Times, September 8, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/international/middleeast/08IRAQ.html?pagewanted=1.

David Rohde, “The Iraq War's Most Damaging Legacy,” Reuters Blogs—David Rohde, http://blogs.reuters.com/david-rohde/2013/03/19/the-iraq-wars-most-damaging-legacy/; Michael Calderone, “Iraq War Media Failure Can Happen Again,” Huffington Post, March 19, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/19/iraq-media-failure-10-year-anniversary_n_2902177.html.

Part of the debate over the Iraq War run-up in 2003 involved whether the White House leaked classified information to White House reporters, who then attributed the information to anonymous sources. A judge ruled that two reporters, the New York Times’ Miller and Time magazine's Matthew Cooper, must divulge their anonymous sources as part of a federal grand jury investigation. Cooper testified after his source relieved him of his pledge of confidentiality, while Miller refused and spent 85 days in jail before her source also released her from her promise to keep his identity secret. The US Supreme Court refused to hear Miller's appeal, in which she argued that she had a constitutional right to withhold her anonymous sources. See Neil A. Lewis, “Source of CIA Leak Said to Admit Role,” New York Times, August 30, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/30/washington/30armitage.html; Norman Pearlstine, Off the Record: The Press, the Government, and the War over Anonymous Sources.

Howard Kurtz, “Newsweek Retracts Guantanamo Story,” Washington Post, May 17, 2005, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/16/AR2005051601262.html.

Kurtz, “Newsweek Retracts Guantanamo Story.”

David Folkenflik, “Use of Anonymous Sources under Fire,” NPR.org, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4674916.

Matt Duffy, “Unnamed Sources: A Longitudinal Review of the Practice and Its Merits” (Ph.D. diss., Georgia State University, 2010).

The stylebook's changes are described more fully in the following section.

Andrew Alexander, “Post Often Ignores Its Own Rules on Anonymous Sources,” Washington Post, August 16, 2009, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/14/AR2009081401928.html; Clark Hoyt, “Those Persistent Anonymous Sources,” New York Times, March 22, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/opinion/22pubed.html.

Donald L. Shaw, Maxwell McCombs, and Gerry Keir, Advanced Reporting: Discovering Patterns in News Events, 2nd ed. (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1996); Jerry Lanson and Mitchell Stephens, Writing and Reporting the News, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Brian S. Brooks et al., News Reporting and Writing, 8th ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2005).

See, for example, Gina Vega, “Caveat Emptor: Ethical Chauvinism in the Global Economy,” Journal of Business Ethics 16, no. 12–13 (September 1997): 1353–1362; W. Bradley Wendel, “Teaching Ethics in an Atmosphere of Skepticism and Relativism,” University of San Francisco Law Review 36, no. 3 (April 15, 2002): 711–758; Jay Martinson and Paul Haughey, Throwing Out the Relativity Bath Water without Losing the Diversity Baby: Teaching Diversity versus Relativity in a Communication Ethics Course, paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Central States Communication Association, Indianapolis, IN, 1995.

Shaw, McCombs, and Keir, Advanced Reporting.

Brooks et al., News Reporting and Writing; Lanson and Stephens, Writing and Reporting the News.

“Code of Ethics” (Society of Professional Journalists, 1996).

Steve Weinberg, The Reporter's Handbook: An Investigator's Guide to Documents and Techniques (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996).

Bruce M. Swain and J. Michael Robertson, “The Washington Post and the Woodward Problem,” Newspaper Research Journal 16, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 2–20.

Weinberg, “The Reporter's Handbook,” 491.

Shepard, “Anonymous Sources,” para. 11.

Steven Weinberg, “The Secret Sharer,” Mother Jones, May 1992, 59.

In 2003, the New York Times discovered that reporter Jayson Blair had fabricated many stories during his four years reporting for the paper. At USA Today, the paper revealed in 2004 that many of the unnamed sources cited in the work of longtime foreign correspondent Jack Kelley were fabricated. The episode led the paper's founder to ban the use of unnamed sources. The New York Times and Washington Post updated their policies regarding unnamed sources. See, for example, Reider, “The Jayson Blair Affair”; Blake Morrison, “Ex-USA Today Reporter Faked Major Stories,” March 19, 2004, http://www.usatoday.com/news/2004-03-18-2004-03-18_kelleymain_x.htm; Leonard Downie, “The Guidelines We Use to Report the News,” Washington Post, March 7, 2004; Hoyt, “Culling the Anonymous Sources.”

Norm Goldstein, ed., AP Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law (New York: Associated Press, 2004).

Ibid., 17.

Ibid.

Darrell Christian, David Minthorn, and Sally Jacobsen, eds., The Associated Press Stylebook 2009, 43rd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2009).

Kirchner, “NYT Internal Memo Addresses Anonymous Sourcing”; Sheehy, “Study Examines Unnamed Source Policies at the Washington Post.”

Herbert Strentz, News Reporters and News Sources.

Sheehy cast doubt on the resoluteness of the “two-source rule” at the Washington Post. For more, see footnote 45 of his article, “Study Examines Unnamed Source Policies at the Washington Post.”

Paul N. Williams, Investigative Reporting and Editing (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978), 68.

This, too, is consistent with Watergate reporting. While Woodward and Bernstein attributed information to unnamed sources at times, their work relied on many named sources and reliable documentation.

Boeyink, “Anonymous Sources in News Stories,” 243.

Lori Robertson, “A Source of Embarrassment,” American Journalism Review, April 1997, para. 1, http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=2314.

Goldstein, AP Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law, 17.

Christian, Minthorn, and Jacobsen, The Associated Press Stylebook 2009.

“Keller Memo on Anonymous Sources,” New York Times, June 9, 2008, para. 27.

Sheehy, “Study Examines Unnamed Source Policies at the Washington Post,” 6.

Jocelyn Hanamirian, “The Right to Remain Anonymous: Anonymous Speakers, Confidential Sources and the Public Good,” Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts 35, no. 1 (Fall 2011): 119–140; Damian Carney, “Truth and the Unnamed Source,” Journal of Media Law 4, no. 1 (July 2012): 117–145; Margaret Sullivan, “The Disconnect on Anonymous Sources,” New York Times, October 12, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/opinion/sunday/the-public-editor-the-disconnect-on-anonymous-sources.html.

Boeyink, “Anonymous Sources in News Stories”; Reider, “The Jayson Blair Affair”; Alicia Shepard, “Anonymous Sources,” American Journalism Review, December 1994, http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=1596; Morrison, “Ex-USA Today Reporter Faked Major Stories.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matt J. Duffy

Matt J. Duffy is an adjunct professor in the Department of Communication at Kennesaw State University, 1000 Chastain Road, MD 2207, Kennesaw, GA 30144, [email protected]