Anonymous Sources

[alfred russel]

Have you ever talked to a reporter AR?

Actually, I forgot...I have!

My company got a call from a reporter about this time last year wanting information on how our company's asia operations to put in context exposure to covid. My reaction was not to give data because we might have liability if we gave bad information, but I was told to help.

So the reporter asked me a couple pointless questions about the scope of our facilities in asia, and I didn't know the answer and told him I'd have to contact our offices in asia to get him the answers but it was nighttime there so i wouldn't have the info until tomorrow. He said that was too late because he had a filing deadline, but he had some old data and asked if that was right. I said it probably was back then if it came from us, but it is out of date and is probably not right anymore, and if he wanted the right data he would have to wait until the morning. I got the information for him the next morning, but they had already published the story with the old data.

[Admiral Yi]

Fredo, your motivation for wanting to see less use of unnamed sources is narcissistic.  If a reporter uses unnamed sources in a story, you would rather the story not exist.  Yet others, such as myself, are able to read that story, discount it for the appropriate reasons, and come to our own conclusion about how truthful it is.  You want to deprive me of something that provides me value.

A non-narcissistic alternative would be to ignore these stories.

[The Brain]

Fredo, your motivation for wanting to see less use of unnamed sources is narcissistic.  If a reporter uses unnamed sources in a story, you would rather the story not exist. 

My understanding is that AR thinks the AP standard is fine.

[Jacob]

I don't think reporters should be treated like priests where you accept their statements without any corroborative details. If you want to do that, cool -- but I'm more of a skeptic.

Obviously you judge them based on their individual reputations, and the reputations of the organizations they report for (and who provide editorial oversight).

In this specific case, the reporter's description could be from a very well places source and highly meaningful, or it could be equally factual and yet meaningless. It leaves the impression that there are republican congresspeople that wanted to vote for impeachment but were intimidated not to: it is an impression that may one day be proven but is impossible to ever disprove.

Yup. So you look at their track records. How much what they've reported like that have been a good bellwether for future events? How many people have later come out, and clearly and on the record, corroborated what they've said?

Anonymous sources quoted on Breitbart or AlfredRussell.RU are less reliable than those quoted by established reporters published in reputable media.

My point of view is that if all you can say is that some anonymous republican on the hill told you that some congressman is being motivated by xyz, you don't have a story. Shame on anyone that takes it seriously enough to discuss, unless they are discussing your shitty reporting standards in which case it is worth many pages of commentary.

You totally do have a story. And it's not shitty reporting standards. You're just being lazy and excusing that laziness by finding fault with something that has worked quite well for centuries.

[mongers]

Didn't he die on that hill or did he march his well ordered opinions back  down again?

[DGuller]

You're probably not a very good rock climber if you wind up dying on a hill.

[The Brain]

Didn't he die on that hill or did he march his well ordered opinions back  down again?

He made a deal with God.

[katmai]

I have it from reliable anonymous sources that Dorsey is a douchenozzle.

[alfred russel]

Fredo, your motivation for wanting to see less use of unnamed sources is narcissistic.  If a reporter uses unnamed sources in a story, you would rather the story not exist.  Yet others, such as myself, are able to read that story, discount it for the appropriate reasons, and come to our own conclusion about how truthful it is.  You want to deprive me of something that provides me value.

A non-narcissistic alternative would be to ignore these stories.

By an equal measure your motivation for wanting to see more use of unnamed sources is narcissistic. It isn't the case that if standards were tighter we would have 100 well sourced stories, but with looser standards we have 150 stories: the original 100 plus 50 more.

The number of stories is more or less defined. CNN doesn't sign off for the evening telling the audience "we only got 20 hours of stories today so we have to sign off for the last 4". Newspapers are reasonably consistent lengths whatever their reporters come up with.

I expect that the capitol hill team for CNN was going to report some story that day. They went with "some guy told us some other guys told him that they did x because of y". Maybe their backup was something trivial like "Mitch McConnell said he will have to see how the nomination process plays out to decide whether he supports Biden's cabinet appointments." I'd prefer the latter story, you'd prefer the former, it is more or less a mutually exclusive situation. And the fact we are talking about the former and would obviously glaze over the latter is a reason standards are slipping in the much more competitive and fragmented journalistic environment.

[alfred russel]

I have it from reliable anonymous sources that Dorsey is a douchenozzle.

You seriously couldn't find anyone willing to go on the record with that? 

[alfred russel]

Yup. So you look at their track records. How much what they've reported like that have been a good bellwether for future events? How many people have later come out, and clearly and on the record, corroborated what they've said?

Anonymous sources quoted on Breitbart or AlfredRussell.RU are less reliable than those quoted by established reporters published in reputable media.

But it is impossible to have a negative track record in this instance!

It doesn't take a rocket scientists to understand that there are disprovable and non disprovable stories. I think upthread I distinguished between the two. If the story is "senior administration officials tell me that next week they are going to do xyz" - I'm fine with that! Yes it is less reliable than if a senior administration official put his or her name behind it, but people are putting their reputations on the journalist, and the journalist is ultimately putting his/her reputation on the line with the audience. Everyone will know in a week if the journalist had good sources or BS ones.

But here: it is impossible for the journalist to ever know her sources were lying to her (assuming they were). It is also impossible for the audience to know (again assuming they are lying).

It doesn't take a very sophisticated person to realize that their reputation is at stake in disprovable stories, and to thus use a high standard with those, while being looser with the ones that aren't disprovable.

[alfred russel]

So I don't know if you guys remember this at all...this goes back 15-20 years. I used to read slate and salon and got a kick out of submitting anonymous letters to the advice columnist. They would usually be involved and ridiculous. I never got published by slate, but I got a couple on salon. I got a big kick out of that.

You may also vaguely remember that Michael Moore was a phenomena for a while and published a book of letters from military people denouncing the Iraq War. It was on the best seller list. He used anonymous letters. After the book came out, I thought, "I wonder how valid these letters are?" So I wrote him a fake letter, and a few days later it wasn't just on his website, it was the featured letter. There were no attempts to validate my identity, until mongers emailed him that I was a fake. Then they contacted me and I told them I was a fake and they took the story down.

[The Minsky Moment]

Michael Moore and the salon advice columnist are not exactly the best journalistic models.  Their shortcomings as journalists go far far beyond use (or abuse) of un-named sources.

[DGuller]

I think one check on journalists abusing anonymous sources is that they can't just pretend that consequences of getting it wrong don't apply to them.  There are probably more than a few people who make it their job to sting them with false gossip.

[alfred russel]

Michael Moore and the salon advice columnist are not exactly the best journalistic models.  Their shortcomings as journalists go far far beyond use (or abuse) of un-named sources.

I'm an accountant at a bigger company...I've worked on M&A transactions which ended up leaking to the press...I wonder how hard it would be for me to get BS stories into the business section.