Clark Hoyt, the NYT's public editor, says a policy introduced four years ago seems to have succeeded in raising the editorial standards of who is granted anonymous source status, but problems still remain.
Because the painful Jayson Blair scandal involved articles containing unnamed sources who apparently did not exist, The Times tightened its standards in 2004. Bill Keller, the executive editor, and Allan Siegal, then the standards editor, wrote a policy declaring, “We resist granting sources anonymity except as a last resort to obtain information that we believe to be newsworthy and reliable.”
The policy requires that at least one editor know the identity of every source. Anonymous sources cannot be used when on-the-record sources are readily available. They must have direct knowledge of the information they are imparting; they cannot use the cloak of anonymity for personal or partisan attack; they cannot be used for trivial comment or to make an unremarkable comment seem more important than it is.
Although the purpose of the policy was not explicitly to reduce the number of anonymous sources, Keller said last week, “If you tell the editing system to be more challenging of anonymous sources, it ought to reduce the number.”
Not long after I arrived as public editor last spring, I asked a class at Columbia to study The Times’s use of anonymous sources to see how well the newspaper was living up to the 2004 policy.
A group of 17 students under the direction of Professor Richard C. Wald, a former president of NBC News, read every word of every article in six issues of the newspaper published before the policy and six from last fall. Here is what they found:
The number of articles relying on anonymous sources fell by roughly half after the policy was introduced.
Most anonymous sources — nearly 80 percent — were still not adequately described to readers. How did they know their information? Why did they need anonymity? But that was still better than before the policy, when nearly 90 percent were inadequately described.
The use of anonymous sources to air opinion, not fact, increased after 2004, even though the policy would seem to discourage that.
Anonymous sources were much less likely to appear on Page 1 under the new policy, perhaps because front-page articles got more scrutiny from editors.
The use of anonymous sources declined in virtually every part of the newspaper, except the Business section, where they inexplicably shot up. Stories from Washington, where anonymity is bred into the political and government culture, accounted for roughly a third of all anonymous sources in the newspaper before the policy and declined to roughly a quarter of them afterward.
The findings suggest that The Times is policing the unnecessary use of anonymous sources better than the students or I expected — but that it still has a long way to go to help readers understand the reliability of an unnamed source and why that source cannot be identified.