With the news that two reporters in San Francisco are facing jail time for refusing to identify the person or persons who provided them with transcripts of grand jury testimony related to the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO) investigation, I think it’s important to look at the use of anonymous sources in news stories.
If you’re not familiar with the story, take a few moments to read this article. While the article doesn’t go too far in depth, it should give you at least a bit of background to the rest of this rant. I want to say from the start that I’m not an expert on the whole BALCO investigation, but what I do know is that the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative has been named or implicated in supplying various illegal performance enhancing drugs to a number of athletes, including major names in professional baseball, football, track and other sports.
The reporters are refusing to name their source or sources, as they promised them anonymity. Going back on such a promise would make it hard for the reporters to get other sources to talk about sensitive topics in the future, which could potentially make the public less informed about important issues. The fundamental question to all of this is: Should they have promised their source anonymity in the first place?
To work out the answer, I’ll be discussing a few other stories that used anonymous sources, too, such as the Wen Ho Lee story, the Valerie Plame story, the 60 Minutes story questioning the President’s National Guard service, and the CIA secret jails story. The use of anonymous sources in each of these stories provides some insight into when such sources should and shouldn’t be used. By examining these stories, I hope you’ll get a new perspective whenever you see references to un-named sources in the future.
As a journalist, I’ve heard the question “When is it OK to use anonymous sources?” discussed many different times, with reasonable people reaching differing conclusions. Whichever side you agree with — that it is OK or that it isn’t OK to use un-named sources — anonymous sources present problems for journalists for a number of reasons, including:
- The source may have legitimate information about a story, but will suffer retribution if identified publicly
- The source may provide information that is difficult to verify or can’t be verified independently
- The source may have a hidden agenda, such as a vendetta against the people he or she is accusing of wrong-doing
- The source may be trying to deflect attention from another story, in which he or she may be involved
- The source may be looking for some form of financial compensation
- The source may be expecting something else in return, such as lenient treatment on future stories
With the exception of the first item, a whistleblower who fears retribution, I believe it is not appropriate to use an anonymous source.
Let’s go over a few stories where anonymous sources were used. To start, let’s look at the Wen Ho Lee story. Lee was the scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory who was accused of supplying classified information to China during the late 1990s. Stories in a number of newspapers quoted an anonymous source within the Federal government as saying he was the person under suspicion for having given away state secrets to another country.
There was one problem with the story. It wasn’t true. Perhaps the government was looking at Lee at that time, but ultimately, after Lee spent about a year in prison, much of it in solitary confinement, the government was unable to prove their case. It was built on lies, distortion and misinformation. OK, I can already hear some of you saying, “Rant, you’re going off the reservation again. Lies and distortion? Give me an example.”
Here it is: Lee spent time in solitary due to the perjury of an FBI agent (yes, you read that right, a federal agent perjured himself in open court). To date, I haven’t been able to find any information about whether the agent involved was disciplined or suffered any consequences for his behavior. If someone has it, I’ll be glad to post the info.
By the time the case was over, Lee took a plea bargain that had him admit to one count of mishandling classified information, while all the other charges were dropped. And the judge apologized to him, in court, for the treatment he received.
In the aftermath, Lee has sued some of the reporters and news organizations who reported this story using one or more anonymous sources. Those organizations have not owned up to who gave them the story, but they have paid him some damages. Perhaps that’s a fair settlement, but the people who smeared his name should be held to account.
This man has been unemployable since the whole scandal broke, he spent more time in prison than most would have for the charge he admitted to, and while he was there his punishment was more severe than anyone else would have received. It was a travesty. And it all started with an anonymous source whose motives should have been more carefully weighed before running the story. And the source’s information should have been more carefully vetted. Had the New York Times and the other news organizations involved been more careful, this man’s reputation would still be intact today.
The whole ruckus happened due to hysteria over who gave American secrets to the Chinese, and Wen Ho Lee happened to be guilty of working at Los Alamos while being of Chinese origin (well, Taiwanese, to be exact). A credible news organization might have asked some questions of their source like: Since China has more than 3 times the population we do, and assuming they have the same percentage of smart people who are physicists, chemists and engineers (which means more than three times as many as we do), couldn’t they have figured this out on their own? Or, another gem, such as: How can you be sure, Mr. Government Official, that the person who gave them the information was of Chinese descent?
So, bottom line, the reporters should not have allowed their source(s) anonymity on this one. It was already well-known that an investigation was happening. This just focused it on an individual who just happened to be innocent. Perhaps even distracting our law enforcement agencies from pursuing better leads. Then again, maybe that was the whole point. Or maybe the official was trying to appease some politicians, to show that the government was actually doing something. I could go on, but let’s take another example that’s been in the news recently, and that’s the Valerie Plame story.
Last year, New York Times reporter Judith Miller spent 80-some days in prison for refusing to divulge the source who told her Valerie Plame was a CIA operative when asked to do so by a federal grand jury. Outing an undercover CIA officer is a crime, and rightly so. We need our spooks to operate under the radar, not out in the open for all to see. So this grand jury was trying to get to the bottom of who outed her.
Turns out, some of the officials involved in spreading this story were political appointees. Translation: People with an agenda. They were running a smear campaign against Plame’s husband, Joe Wilson, who had publicly criticized the Bush administration’s assertions that Iraq had been seeking to buy “yellow cake” uranium from Niger. Wilson wrote an Op Ed piece that contradicted the assertions made by the administration during the run-up to the Iraq war.
In this case, the Times editors should have carefully considered whether their anonymous source had any ulterior motives when deciding whether to release the source’s name. The source — I. Lewis (“Scooter”) Libby — did actually have some ulterior motives, so they should not have allowed him anonymity.
When you’re using anonymous sources, you need to be able to trust their information. Libby’s information was correct, but what Joe Wilson’s wife did for a living only mattered to those who wished to call his report into question. They were trying to create the impression that his wife had thrown him some business improperly — among other things. So Libby’s motives needed to be carefully considered. And in this case, his motive was a political smear campaign. That’s not a good reason to be granting him anonymity. In that case, they were only enabling him to get away with his nefarious actions.
Let’s talk about the Dan Rather story on 60 Minutes which questioned the President’s National Guard record. A mysterious person offers up an old memo that casts the President’s behavior in a bad light. No one knows who exactly this person is, but the information looks authentic. So they run with the story. And when it raises the hackles of conservatives and the conservative portion of the blogosphere, they backed the story.
Problem is, the documents this mysterious person provided may have been forgeries. Many question the font used in the memo at the center of the story. Careful research would actually show that the font was available on certain IBM Selectric typewriters during the early 70s, but the question still remains as to whether the commander and his staff had Selectric typewriters with this particular font.
Ultimately, CBS had to retract major portions of the story. Had they taken a few moments to ask a few questions about the source, perhaps they would have averted the attendant bad publicity. First, the source was someone shrouded in mystery. They couldn’t actually put a real person’s name to who gave them the material. Secondly, they didn’t do a good job of authenticating the document.
Given that it was during the heat of a political campaign, and Dan Rather is someone conservatives love to hate, perhaps they should have been suspicious that it was a set-up meant to embarrass Rather and all of CBS. Knowing what I know about politics (I grew up in a political family), I wouldn’t put this past certain operatives. Bottom line: CBS couldn’t be certain of the source’s motives, they should have been very suspicious of the story and they should have passed on it.
The last story we’ll look at is the CIA secret prisons story which first appeared in the Washington Post. This story confirmed allegations that had been made in the foreign press and brought to light a program that gives our country a huge black eye when it comes to championing democracy and the rule of law. Our own government turned out to be doing things that would clearly be against the law over here. (For some, I know this is no great surprise. Guantánamo Bay comes to mind.) It’s an important story, which combined with the revelations and allegations of how prisoners are treated in Guantánamo Bay, along with news accounts of the “extraordinary rendition” program has been the subject of great debate.
The story relies on anonymous sources. And in this case, it is appropriate to do so. Without the anonymous sources, this story would never have seen the light of day. As citizens, we have a right to know what our government is doing, especially if our government officials are overstepping their authority or clearly breaking the law. It would be preferable to have sources on the record, but very likely these sources would face extreme retribution if they speak out in public.
It’s certainly not a pretty story, but it is an important one. And publishing the story of secret prisons is exactly the kind of oversight, if you will, that the framers of our Constitution had in mind when they guaranteed the right to a free press in the First Amendment.
Circling back to the story that started this whole article, the two reporters from San Francisco who are facing jail time, I can’t say for certain whether the reporters were right to grant their source(s) anonymity in the first place. Perhaps it was required and necessary in order to get the story out, perhaps it wasn’t. My own hunch is that to get this particular story out, it wasn’t really necessary to use anonymous sources. But I don’t have all the information about who the source is and what his or her particular situation happens to be. There may be some extenuating circumstances that made it necessary to keep the source anonymous.
If the reporters fail in their appeals of the current ruling, they may get a fair amount of time to ponder their actions from inside the big house. I wouldn’t wish that on them or anybody else … well, maybe with a few exceptions. Time will tell if they’ve made the right decision.
In the meantime, however, I’d like to encourage my journalistic compatriots to be very careful about choosing whether to use an anonymous source. Many times, these people aren’t being altruistic in their dealings with the media and their true motives could come back to bite you in the ass.
