When Houston Chronicle reporters want to use information
from an unnamed source in a news story, they have to jump through a few hoops
first. A senior editor has to approve
it, and know who the source is. A single unnamed source is rarely enough to go
ahead with a story — there must be two sources with the same firsthand
knowledge. And one of a handful of top editors must sign off on its use before
publication. “The one exception to the
two-source rule is when we have a ‘golden source’ — for example, the police
chief talking about an investigation,” said Nancy Barnes, the Chronicle’s
executive editor.
The vetting process is similar at many large news
organizations — and it’s just one of the practices that journalists assume,
perhaps incorrectly, that news consumers understand. Anonymous sourcing is one of the
least-understood of the mysteries. “A
lot of people seem to think that when we use anonymous sources, we don’t
even know who they are — that they’re anonymous to us,” said Washington Post
reporter Wesley Lowery.
That’s definitely not the case. Anonymity is granted to
known sources under tightly controlled circumstances because they can’t speak
on the record with their names attached for a variety of reasons. News
organizations try to limit their use, embarking on crackdowns and then
sometimes backsliding. Peter Baker, a
reporter in the Washington bureau of the New York Times, said (to a surprised
reaction) at a journalism conference last week that Times Washington reporters
no longer may use “blind quotes” — direct quotations with no names
attached.
I asked a few prominent journalists to describe what they
wish news consumers knew about our business, but probably don’t. I was prompted
to do so after the undercover provocateurs known as Project Veritas released a
video featuring a Post reporter and then crowed about their supposed exposé:
The video showed him describing how harshly critical of President Trump he has
found The Post’s staff-written editorials.
That’s hardly a secret — the editorials, which represent the
consensus of the paper’s editorial board, are published, after all. (Last year,
a group of such critical editorials was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.) But Project Veritas was taking advantage of
the fact that news consumers don’t make a distinction between news reporters
and editorial writers. Inside The Post’s building, though, that split is clear.
News reporters and news-side editors strive for impartiality — they want to
keep their opinions out of their work. By contrast, editorial writers and
columnists are not only allowed to have an opinion, it’s in their job
description.
So, what would some of these experienced news people like
you to know? Ben Smith, editor in
chief of BuzzFeed, told me he wishes readers would understand that sourcing
isn’t always simple. A high-profile source isn’t always a hero and may have
motivations that have little to do with serving the best interests of
democracy. “I have always wished the
public understood how complex and messy sourcing is, and how often sources’
motives are personal or complex. While I appreciate the romantic portrayal of
reporters and sources in movies like ‘The Post’ — and while whistleblowers
from Daniel Ellsberg to the #MeToo voices are truly heroes — Mark Felt is a
much more typical source,” Smith said, referring to the former FBI official who
became the Watergate source known as “Deep Throat,” in part because he had an
ax to grind within the Nixon-era Justice Department.
Smith added that reporting is “an ethically complicated
business whose responsibility is singularly to deliver true stories to the audience.”
But how journalists get there can be discomfiting, he observed. BuzzFeed’s
recent exposé of alleged sexual misconduct by Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.)
told readers that its information was supplied by Mike Cernovich, the far-right
media personality who has promoted conspiracy theories. Richard Tofel, president of the nonprofit
investigative reporting organization ProPublica, told me he wishes the public
would get how seriously journalists take errors. “I don’t think people widely understand how
hard journalists work to get stories right,” he said. “Accuracy is the first
requirement journalists have of each other, for instance, when considering
hiring or promotion. Corrections (and even uncorrected mistakes) are badges of
dishonor.”
Tofel noted that even small mistakes frequently disqualify
long stories from prestigious awards. Journalists do make mistakes, of course,
and we’ve seen far too much of that recently. “But,” he said, “reporters these
days work very hard to get stories straight, and accurate, and fair.” Frank Sesno, director of George Washington
University’s media school, told me he wishes people understood the “the vetting
process, the checks and balances that viewers never see that television
networks do (or should) as a matter of course.”
Sesno, a former Washington bureau chief for CNN, added: “At
CNN, a whole group, the Row, exists to vet scripts, to make sure sound bites
are used in context, to fact-check. They send scripts back when there is any
question.” There is far more checking,
corroborating, debating, arguing, vetting than any viewer could possibly know,
Sesno said. “It belies the prevailing
narrative of ‘fake’ news — because the very systems in place are there (when
used and used correctly) to generate skepticism about stories and sources, to
put the brakes on confirmation bias and leaps of journalistic faith.”
Of course, journalists do mess up sometimes. They can fall
prey to confirmation bias, allow anonymous sources to run amok, fail to be fair
and impartial. Perhaps most often and most foolishly, they can move too fast to
publish in a highly competitive environment.
And then, in a business based on credibility, there’s a price to pay.
