In comments below, Scott Butki asked, “Does it seem odd – or hypocritical to you – that the mantra at news organizations in recent weeks has switched from ‘anonymous sources are bad to use’ to ‘Deep Throat was good for doing what he did and Woodstein good to use him,’ ignoring the contradiction between the two?”
Good question, and I’m sure one that many people are scratching their heads over. What’s going on here? Are anonymous sources really the big problem they seem to be in the wake of the Dan Rather and Newsweek/Koran controversies? On the other hand, if news organizations get too gun-shy about anonymous sources, how will anyone ever be able to keep reporting on the buttoned-tight Bush White House?
It’s funny to watch people try to get their heads around the apparent contradictions between “anonymous sources — good!” and “anonymous sources — bad!” Really, they’re only contradictions if you treat the issue as a matter of journalistic technique (the use of unnamed sources) rather than one about the end to which the technique is employed. The distinction that really matters isn’t between “anonymous source” and “named source”; it’s between “good source” and “bad source.” Good sources can be anonymous; bad sources can be on-the-record. What experienced journalists and editors do is assess, assess, assess. Make sure you’re not being used. Double-check your info. Use your sense of smell. The theory is that an on-the-record statement is more reliable than an anonymous statement, since the person quoted has to defend his words in public. That’s a good theory, and it often applies. But it doesn’t seem to stop most public officials from mouthing the most absurd lies, damned lies and statistics on the record. And despite the rule-of-thumb that on-the-record is more reliable, there are some circumstances where unnamed sourcing is the only way to get the truth out.
One reason people are getting confused is that Woodward and Bernstein’s use of Deep Throat was a fundamentally different kind of anonymous sourcing than we typically see in today’s Beltway. Mark Felt/Deep Throat fed information to Bob Woodward because (a) there were profound dangers to the nation in play — we had a president who was, among many other outrages, ordering his political opponents burglarized — and (b) going to the press was the only option, because the idea of “going to the authorities” is laughable when the authorities are the wrongdoers and they’ve corrupted the system from the top.
I’m not belittling the complexity of Felt’s choice; and obviously the man was conflicted for the rest of his life. It’s never easy to be a whistleblower, and if you’re an unconventional whistleblower stuck in a duel with All the President’s Men, you’ve got to be careful as well as right. Felt is certainly no pure hero, but the derision he’s received from the surviving coterie of Nixon loyalists is beneath contempt. This old guard of die-hard Nixonians still haven’t gotten it through their heads that their former boss actually stole an election (if it weren’t for all the dirty tricks employed against Democrats in 1972, who knows where the vote would have gone?) and, left unchecked, might well have destroyed the American system of government. Their complaints against Felt today only demonstrate how lucky we were that there was at least one “disloyal” Deep Throat willing to say, this nonsense stops here.
Today’s anonymous sources are, for the most part, different. They’re not risking anything by speaking up. Generally, they are choosing to be anonymous to avoid taking a risk. They want to float a trial balloon but don’t want their name attached. They want to undermine a political rival. They want to state something a little politically inconvenient without leaving it on the record.
Anonymous sourcing evolved in the years since Watergate from an extraordinary tactic for an extraordinary time into a depressingly routine way of doing business for the political elite. The Bush administration itself has been extravagantly dependent on the opaque cloak of anonymity — the “highly placed White House official” who assures us that the war is going better, or the economy’s on the mend. This is the sort of anonymous sourcing that ombudsmen and editorial editors and journalism pundits are right to say should be banned. There’s no need for it.
As for the Watergate tradition of anonymous sourcing: every time there’s a president who’s illegally abusing power, let’s hope there’s a Deep Throat ready to talk, a Woodward ready to take notes, and a Ben Bradlee ready to run the stories. Oh, yeah — it also helps if the opposition party controls at least one house of Congress. Otherwise, you could catch the President himself robbing a hotel room — or starting a war under false pretenses — and it wouldn’t matter.
Post Revisions:
There are no revisions for this post.