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Matt Carlson confronts the promise and perils of unnamed sources in this exhaustive analysis of controversial episodes in American journalism during the George W. Bush administration, from prewar reporting mistakes at the New York Times and Washington Post to the Valerie Plame leak case and Dan Rather's lawsuit against CBS News.
Weaving a narrative thread that stretches from the uncritical post-9/11 era to the spectacle of the Scooter Libby trial, Carlson examines a tense period in American history through the lens of journalism. Revealing new insights about high-profile cases involving confidential sources, he highlights contextual and structural features of the era, including pressure from the right, scrutiny from new media and citizen journalists, and the struggles of traditional media to survive amid increased competition and decreased resources.
Journalists have to be careful about making promises to conceal the identity of sources. Information delivered without acknowledging its source can shake public confidence in the information. But confidentiality can also be essential to unearthing important news, news that people in power don't want you to have.
—Chicago Tribune editorial
Readers of the May 26, 2004, New York Times opened their papers to find an unusual note from editor Bill Keller on page A10. Fourteen months after the invasion of Iraq, the newspaper took itself to task for having bungled its reporting on the buildup to what was then in 2004 an increasingly unpopular war. Keller's note called attention to the harm caused by competitive news pressures coupled with the difficulty of reporting on sensitive and secretive topics. But it was also an admission that unnamed sources—those known to the reporter but confidentially kept from readers—posed serious problems for journalism and, in turn, the public by failing to reveal what they were supposed to reveal: that the evidence of an imminently dangerous Iraqi arsenal was not as sound as public claims by the Bush administration made it out to be.
Keller's note was not the coda the newspaper had hoped it would be, nor was the newspaper alone in confronting problems due to anonymity. Rather, an astonishing series of news controversies involving unnamed sources followed in 2004 and 2005 at Newsweek, Time, the Washington Post, and 60 Minutes. The incidents culminated in the 2007 trial of vice presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby for obstructing the investigation into who leaked the identity of CIA analyst Valerie Plame in 2003. The journalistic community witnessed the uncomfortable spectacle of elite journalists spilling details about their relationships with unnamed sources while administration officials described their strategies for anonymously planting favorable news items. During this era, reporters relying on anonymity faced a slew of charges, including harboring political biases, being too close to sources, and placing professional status above the public interest. As controversies accumulated at prominent U.S. news outlets, so did questions on such topics as how the news should cover politics, the impact of elite news in a changing media world, the growing clout of journalism's critics, and the close ties between reporters and sources.
Why did all these incidents happen? And what do they mean for journalism? Or, more importantly, how do they influence the meaning of journalism? These questions require an understanding of how anonymity alters the underlying relationship among news sources, journalists, and audiences. In contrast to conventional attribution, the absence of a source's identity leads to unique risks and rewards that prove difficult to disentangle. Both arise from the bargain struck when a journalist grants anonymity: the identity of the source is withheld to obtain and distribute otherwise unattainable information. The warnings of journalism textbooks aside, this is not an unusual condition sources place on their information, but a regular and often repeated practice. Journalists justify hiding their practices from news audiences by linking this arrangement to their stated goal of holding society's institutions accountable. However, the loss of transparency exposes journalists who rely on unnamed sources to challenges over the accuracy of the information provided and the intentions of all those involved. What emerges is a set of extremes as unnamed sources contribute to journalism's greatest triumphs and its most shameful episodes. To bring into relief these complexities, this book tackles issues that arise when attribution disappears.
More precisely, each chapter illuminates how controversial incidents involving unnamed sources expanded into a wider interpretive struggle. The spark of controversy ignites a public competition in which journalists and others slug it out to define what happened, what (if anything) went wrong, and—most crucially—what should be done differently. Isolated diagnoses of mistakes are eclipsed by scrutiny taking aim at core news practices and deep-seated journalistic norms. By breaking from the unexamined flow of news, these ruptures expose the deep fissures of conflicting needs and pressures underlying newsgathering. Previously taken-for-granted practices face public reconsideration of their very viability. These squabbles deserve attention as a struggle to dictate what journalism should be.
Given this broader focus on the meaning of journalism, this book avoids either a straightforward defense or dismissal of unnamed sources. To do so would oversimplify the inherent problems posed by the loss of attribution whenever anonymity is granted or ignore their worth in providing valuable information to the public. Instead, this book seeks to understand the contradictions of unnamed sources through a cultural analysis of discussions and circumstances that arise when their use proves contentious. This focus on the symbolic tug-of-war erupting around unnamed sources grants us a view of the discursive means by which journalists and their critics compete to define what is acceptable and what is objectionable in the news. This is not merely a struggle over words, but one with real stakes for our expectations of the news and the tools available to achieve them.
Autonomy, Authority, and news Sources
This book proceeds from the premise that there is much to be gained in recognizing journalism as inextricable from the myriad societal institutions, cultural forces, economic conditions, and political contestations in which journalistic work is embedded. It is immediately noteworthy that this assertion strikes at the heart of claims journalists make about their detachment from the world they profess to represent. Autonomy remains a touchstone for journalism—a defining facet ardently defended through invoking the First Amendment as a legitimating document. The protestations of journalists aside, emphasizing context enhances our understanding of how journalism works. In moving away from accepting journalism as autonomous, self-contained, and self-determining, we place ourselves in a better position to examine how various flows of influence and power connect to and shape the news. Journalism should be recognized, in the terminology of Pierre Bourdieu, not as an autonomous entity, but as a heteronomous field inextricably intertwined with adjoining fields—namely politics and economics. Journalism is embedded in and reliant on its environment, which means it can never truly be the independent observer it claims to be. This is not to excoriate the usefulness of journalism; it is only to recognize how the news fits within larger circuits of power and influence, as well as shared cultural values, beliefs, norms, and histories.
Viewing journalism as a field overlapping—sometimes tensely, sometimes amiably—with other fields alerts us to a key problem for journalism: it can never be assured of its cultural role. Just as journalism's autonomy is always compromised, its authority to prosecute the news is always problematic and never guaranteed. It must continually reproduce and renegotiate this role. What's more, this is not an uncrowded endeavor. Journalists constitute only one of the parties—and a complicated and contradictory one at that—seeking to define journalism in a public arena crowded with outspoken critics and stakeholders. This being the case, to deny journalism a fixed cultural position and to focus on its operation within a complex of social relations attunes us to the constant definitional tension surrounding journalistic practice.
Journalists continually address notions of who is a journalist, what journalism is, and what journalism should do against competing notions from others aiming to transform, minimize, stifle, or redefine news practices. Through attending to these questions, journalists seek to sustain their cultural authority to provide veridical stories about the important happenings of the world. This position is never guaranteed, however. Instead, journalists must actively advocate their social value. As David Eason writes, "The history of journalism is, in part, that of establishing, repairing, and transforming the authoritative base for accounts of 'the way it is.'" Journalism cannot be adequately understood only from the inside, but must be considered in conjunction with its broader context. Barbie Zelizer defines journalistic authority as "the ability of journalists to promote themselves as authoritative and credible spokespersons of 'real-life' events." This active effort by journalists to promote their authority encounters disputes on the inside and assaults from the outside.
Nowhere does journalism's quest for authority and its insistence of autonomy appear more fraught than the routinized exchanges between journalists and sources. Decades of critical attention have given us many perspectives for assessing the impact of this relationship, variously posed as "inextricably intertwined" in a mutually beneficial relationship, as enforcing propaganda, as vesting sources with the power to be primary definers, as setting news frames, as providing "structured access" for particular sources at the exclusion of others, and as dominated by an onslaught of public relations practitioners. Others have suggested the relationship between sources and journalists is marked by "complexity and contingency," or, as Herbert Gans describes it, "closer to a tug of war" than a chummy alliance. Nonetheless, critiques of journalistic practice have continually focused on questions of who speaks through the news and who does not.
The power granted to sources to speak through the news places them in a prominent interpretive position. Leon Sigal poignantly highlights this arrangement: "The news is not reality, but a sampling of sources' portrayals of reality, mediated by news organizations." The power of sources arises in part because the provisions of objectivity stifle strong journalistic voices. As a result, sources normally supply evidence in journalistic accounts while the journalist moves to the background as an assembler of quotes. But objectivity alone does not explain news sourcing patterns. It is only one structural constraint linked with others, including the continuous need for news organizations to generate stories as efficiently as possible, the likeness of news structures with other bureaucracies, and homophily between elite journalists and the elite sources they cover.
What emerges is a hierarchy of importance; not all sources are given the same weight. This inequality of access reinforces the "authoritative apparatus of society" by reproducing and legitimating certain perspectives and not others. In all these ways, the literature on sourcing strikes at journalistic notions of autonomy by signaling a disconnect between journalism's norms and the patterns that emerge in practice. Journalists base their authority on a normative independence activated through objective reporting standards. Yet, in practice, journalism relies on knowledgeable, authoritative sources to maintain its authority and to confront constraints on resources and time.
The gulf between the rhetoric of autonomy espoused by journalists and their actual sourcing practices creates a problem for journalism. David Eason uses the term "disobedient dependence" to describe journalistic efforts to negotiate the contradiction between journalistic independence and reliance on official sources: "Dependent upon governmental authority for its conventional coverage and disobedient to the same authority in its exposés, the press advertise[s] its own freedom and independence from government while remaining conventionally bound to that authority for the bulk of its news." Journalism relies on official sources to construct an authoritative account of the world, yet it must simultaneously proclaim its independence from such sources through accentuating its watchdog role. Despite the centrality of autonomy to journalistic authority, it is endlessly problematic in practice.
Unnamed Sources: Promise or Peril?
Unfortunately, the special case of anonymity has received scant attention within the body of work examining news sources. In theorizing about how unnamed sources relate to problems plaguing news sourcing raised above, two possibilities present themselves. In one view, promise underlying the use of unnamed sources derives from the hope that by circumventing standard conventions, journalists can escape the bonds of their patterned relationships with sources. Pushing aside attribution allows journalists to challenge on-the-record claims or force out into the open guarded information. This revelatory perspective of unnamed sources allows journalism to break from its stale patterns to truly serve out its normative pledge of holding power accountable. And while this may sound overly normative, there are ample moments in which journalists have broken a news story of considerable political importance through the use of unnamed sources.
Of course, it doesn't always happen this way. A perilous view of unnamed sources suggests that anonymity only magnifies problems accompanying journalist-source relations. Dashing hopes of enhanced accountability, journalists merely facilitate a flow of unattributed—and therefore unverifiable—claims into the news. With the newsgathering processes mystified, the audience meets only disembodied voices purported by journalists to be dependable and reputable. At its worst, the use of unnamed sources further entrenches the dominance of elite news sources capable of commanding anonymity from journalists hungry for stories and access. The fragile dynamic of disobedient dependence gives way to simply dependence, further eroding journalism's claims of acting as a detached observer and, therefore, its claims to cultural authority.
Given the potential for both promise and peril, unnamed sources deserve more attention than they have received thus far. In the chapters that follow, the practices underlying the use of unnamed sources are brought to light in the midst of controversial uses and challenges from inside and outside of journalism. But before delving into specifics, the culture of unnamed source requires further attention.
Journalism and the Culture of Unnamed Sources
An unnamed source is a common sight in U.S. journalism, particularly in the national affairs reporting of elite news outlets—a group comprising network and cable television news, news magazines, and a handful of influential newspapers with a national reach. The prevalence of unnamed sources persists despite internal guidelines stressing restraint and external criticism advocating transparency. Numerous studies document the extent to which unnamed sources appear in news content. One study found rampant use of unnamed sources in national security reporting in major newspapers with 48 percent of executive branch sources and 32 percent of congressional sources going unnamed.
While these studies provide numerical evidence documenting the number of unnamed sources, the interest here is not the quantity of anonymity measured over time and across news outlets, but the impact of a style of journalism that regularly relies on unnamed sources to report the news. What does it mean to withhold the identity of a source in return for his or her information? What types of relationships develop between journalists and sources? How does it affect notions of acceptable journalistic practice and journalistic success? How does it alter how sources insert their messages into news? These sorts of questions are better answered through an approach that recognizes the culture of unnamed sources as a culture. This view steers an inquiry into unnamed sources away from frequency and implementation toward questions of shared meanings and patterns of collective interpretation among journalists, sources, and audiences. The granting of anonymity is not simply a matter of technique. Rather, it is an appeal to a particular way of imagining the relations between these three parties.
When introducing an unnamed source into a news story, the journalist implies that the value gained in making hidden information public outweighs the lack of transparency in withholding the source's identity. However, the opacity of unnamed sources prevents audiences from gaining additional information from which to make judgments about unattributed information. Unnamed sources require unseen news practices, which results in journalism's increased vulnerability to charges of hiding unacceptable biases or improper source-journalist relations. This becomes a problem for journalists when questions of motive and autonomy creep in. As Taegyu Son warns, "The more journalists grant anonymity to sources without verifying their bias, calculation, and purpose, the more often they sink to being government's managerial tool, putting journalists on slippery moral ground." Son confronts the normative conception situating unnamed sources as a tool aiding journalists in collecting otherwise hidden information by suggesting that journalists primarily grant anonymity in exchange for access. By allowing sources to speak without accountability, journalists' claims of autonomy evaporate, leaving behind a pattern of privileging sources above audiences.
In the face of such problems confronting the practice of source anonymity, four sets of questions hover above any investigation into the use of unnamed sources in the news: Where did this culture of anonymity originate? What motives do sources have for seeking anonymity? What compels journalists to grant it? What do news audiences think of it all?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from On the Condition of Anonymity by MATT CARLSON Copyright © 2011 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Overview
Matt Carlson confronts the promise and perils of unnamed sources in this exhaustive analysis of controversial episodes in American journalism during the George W. Bush administration, from prewar reporting mistakes at the New York Times and Washington Post to the Valerie Plame leak case and Dan Rather's lawsuit against CBS News.
Weaving a narrative thread that stretches from the uncritical post-9/11 era to the spectacle of the Scooter Libby trial,...