Among the journalistic practices held up for scrutiny by the Scooter Libby trial is the prolific use of anonymous sources to questionable ends. Administration officials including Libby, Karl Rove and Dan Bartlett used casually granted anonymity to steer reporters away from the substance of a story — the administration’s use of tainted, if not manufactured, intelligence regarding Iraq’s putative nuclear weapons program — to the irrelevant margins of it: the question of whether or not former ambassador Joseph Wilson’s wife played a role in sending him to Niger on behalf of the CIA. The officials used anonymity, and hence reporters, to shield themselves from being held accountable for the effort to discredit Wilson not on the merits but on the smear.
Military officials pulled the same stunt, with the same agreeable cooperation from journalists, during their Baghdad briefing on the “evidence” that the Iranian government is involved in attacks upon US troops in Iraq. The briefing involved no names, no cameras, no audio recordings, no accountability and claims about Iran that were almost immediately refuted by the top US military officer. Absent the repeated contradictory statements from Joint Chiefs chairman Peter Pace, the Baghdad briefing would still stand as the US government position of record.
Pace’s refusal to back down from his insistence that the US has no evidence that the Iranian leadership is involved in planning or executing attacks against the US in Iraq is laudatory, not least because he’s brought civilian officials on board. But the officers in Baghdad, with the connivance of reporters, have managed to preserve their virginity on the subject. If or when they speak on the record, their audience will not know whether or not they are among the demonstrated but anonymous liars. By agreeing to the conditions proposed by the briefers, reporters have fatally impaired the ability of the public to judge the reliability of the officials in question. The default position has to be that anyone speaking to the issue is lying, a circumstance that renders not just official pronouncements but institutional press reporting, meaningless. And at bottom, the reporters have no valid reason for acceding to those conditions; it’s a self-inflicted wound on both ends of the bargain.
The performances by the administration, the military and reporters before and after the invasion of Iraq make that default position the only sensible one regardless whether officials are speaking on or off the record. We can’t do much about the habitual dishonesty of administration and military officials, but journalists have the option of refusing anonymity in instances where the goal is clearly to avoid creating a public record of the source’s reliability or lack thereof. There may rarely be occasions when speaking off the record or on background is necessary, and whistleblowers should enjoy whatever protections journalists can afford them, but reporters who repeatedly and cheerfully enable official lies and distortions, and give them the imprimatur of “news,” are on the wrong side of the process. Some of them show signs that they can be retrained; others, we’ll probably have to wait until they die or get kicked upstairs to the pundit room.
As I commented earlier on this site, there should be no or, at worst, very rare use of anonymous sources by responsible reporters. They’ll come to the reporters because they need the reporters. Otherwise the reporters will just report what the officials do instead of what they say and imply. That would be disastrous for the officials involved. They might even end up having to explain themselves.
I hear IF Stone made a pretty good career of it w/o relying on the anonymous source.
Unfortunately, IF, bless him, was largely only read by the choir.
I don’t object to the judicious use of anonymous sources. When the then-Knight Ridder reporters were committing responsible journalism before the invasion, they relied a lot on mid-level officials and bureaucrats who probably would have been fired had they spoken on the record. Nothing wrong with that, so long as the rule of thumb requiring at least one independent verification of a story is followed. It’s this wholesale issuing of free passes to people who are essentially conveying the official administration stance on something but want to avoid being pressed about it that bothers me, and undercuts the whole premise of reporting.
Jack is right: however much the administration despise reporters, they need them. But reporters can’t trust each other to recognize that or to behave ethically. I remember an incident last year or the year before when someone, I think the AP White House reporter, objected to a briefing being held on background for no apparent reason and walked out on it. This was something the members of the White House Correspondents Association had discussed among themselves and had complained about to McClellan, so when he walked out he expected his colleagues to join him. None of them did. End of revolution. At this point I think we’re more or less consigned to waiting for the next generation of reporters to displace the current one, and for people such as the McClatchy crew to infiltrate the more august organizations and bring some credibility to them. And there’s a serious problem with editorial standards, too. Reporters can’t get away with this crap without the collusion of their editors.
What is going on at journalism schools. Journalist, by training, should know what is demanded of them in the way of accountability. So the question becomes where does the problem lie; with the journalism schools or the management at news organizations that compromises the very journalists that provide the copy. Is this still another case of money corrupting absolutely?
Lastly, how many Journalists are actually trained in the profession and know the rules. We know, for instance, that Tim Russert is a lawyer by training. How is this different than making another lawyer, Michael Brown, FEMA Director? Come to think of it, a lot of today’s journalists remind me a lot of Michael Brown.