Years of lament over anonymous sources gave way this spring to a spate of policy-tightening. (See The New York Times and Washington Post, among others.) That welcome step, alas, may mostly have resulted in lengthier descriptions of the same old anonymous sources –- perhaps in even greater numbers.
Now comes a still more promising stage: Action. First, Slate‘s Jack Shafer offered to help reporters “out” officials who insist on giving briefings anonymously. Now the NYT’s Dan Okrent suggests that the AP and the five largest papers agree not to cover anonymous government briefings.
The Okrent idea gets at the problem that has dashed reform efforts in the past. Okrent previously cited former NYT Washburo chief Andy Rosenthal’s efforts to get more on-the-record attribution. Ben Bradlee sought the same at the Post. Both failed because other media organizations were still going along with the anonymizers. The solution lies in collaboration, as Okrent’s AP-and-the-five-big-papers idea acknowledges.
Another possibility (call it a friendly amendment) is collaboration among Washington bureau chiefs. These folks (I need to say here that my husband, David Westphal, is McClatchy’s bureau chief) have worked together to deal with the Pentagon on war coverage. I propose they make the overuse of anonymity their next campaign.
Start with the low-hanging fruit — declining to cover routine briefings by government officials who refuse to be named. If bureau chiefs of the largest news organizations in Washington agreed to do this, I’m betting it would be a solid first step toward real change at last — a change the rest of the American media (not to mention their readers and viewers and listeners) would thank them for.
