On The Condition of Anonymity: Unnamed Sources and the Battle for Journalism

6. Rethinking Anonymity: Problems and Solutions

6 Rethinking Anonymity: Problems and Solutions So where do these high-profile incidents leave the readers? In the cold, that’s where. They don’t know what to think. . . . This goes to the heart of the biggest issue facing American media today: credibility. —Terence Smith on NPR’s All Things Considered As the dust clears from a string of struggles over unnamed sources at elite news outlets, the inevitable question arises: how did the New York Times, Washington Post, CBS News, Time, and Newsweek all become embroiled in controversies involving unnamed sources? This was not a single story or an isolated wayward reporter, but an overlapping series of incidents united through their use of source anonymity, elite journalists, and focus on Bush administration actions. To start to untangle this mess, it is useful to first return to the discussion of unnamed sources offered at the outset of this book. While volumes of scholarly work have usefully dissected less than ideal relationships between journalists and their sources, little attention has been paid to unnamed sources as a particular case. Anonymity is a tool taken up by journalists to provide certain information deemed otherwise unattainable. As with all tools, the question best lies in how it is used. When journalists turn to anonymity, two potentials emerge—unnamed sources as promising and as perilous. The promise is that by shaking off attribution, journalists can break free of relations with sources that all too often appear routinized and unchallenging. Anonymity, in this vision, disrupts circuits of power and legitimation flowing through patterns of news sourcing that ordinarily—but not absolutely—privilege elite sources while i-x_1-206_Carl.indd 138 1/21/11 2:48:39 PM leaving out other voices. Anonymity gives journalists a way to combat structural constraints that hinder its normative mission. By contrast, a perilous vision sees unnamed sources as only exacerbating the already entrenched problems of news sources by hiding even such basic information as the name of a source. Absent identification, unnamed sources can really only be heard and not judged—the judging, ostensibly, having already been built into the arrangement by the journalist. The public may recognize this perilousness only at the moment it becomes a problem for journalism—the moment when facts become challenged, motives appear suspect, and arguments for trust fall under fire. The events detailed in this book make clear the prevalence of this latter view—the image of unnamed sources as perilous—in discussions surrounding the journalistic use of anonymity. Time after time, the use of unnamed sources came across as flawed, sloppy, and, at worst, corroborating officials’ claims undeserving of any journalistic legitimation. But any such conclusion needs to be explored in more depth to understand both the issues and responses that persisted throughout discussions of the incidents covered in this book. The goal is not merely to catalog the wreckage recounted in the previous chapters or advocate for the banishment of anonymity, but to carefully pick through this discourse to figure out how the promise of unnamed sources may be activated as part of a larger and much-needed reconception of journalism in these early years of the twenty-first century. Defining Journalism While Defining Controversy Before turning to patterns in the persistent squabbling around journalistic uses of unnamed sources, we need to revisit an argument central to this book: journalism is an inconstant, evolving, culturally constructed practice. Journalists may present their role to be obvious, historically mandated, stable, self-defining, and, above all, autonomous. However entrenched these claims may be, treating journalism as an institution somehow existing outside of the social context in which it operates severely limits any analysis of its problems or attempt to craft potential solutions. For this reason, the view here is of journalism as a form of cultural production, a complex amalgam of practices existing alongside—and constantly overlapping—with other institutions and cultural forms.1 Journalism is an embedded institution, intersecting with fields of political, economic, and cultural power at every turn. What we gain by not treating journalism as an isolated entity is sensitivity to the ways in which journalism comes to be culturally negotiated. It is not rethinking anonymity · 139 i-x_1-206_Carl.indd 139 1/21/11 2:48:39 PM unusual to see, whether explicitly stated or thinly implied, such questions as what is good journalism or bad journalism? What should journalism do? Who is a journalist? These questions...