To my eyes, this seems to be a recent trend: a newspaper article gets information from an anonymous source and explains this source thusly:
*
“The number of dead was confirmed by a Connecticut government official who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.”*
This type of long-winded explanation seems to be the norm and I see it all the time. Has it always been like this? Is this a modern style of reporting? What’s wrong with saying: “The number of dead was confirmed by an anonymous source within the Conn. government”?
My attempt at an explanation is that using my version makes the source sound shady and dubious, whereas the quoted version is trying really, really hard to explain to the reader that the source is legitimate and trustworthy. What says you all?
Thanks,
Greg
Anonymous sources are an ongoing source of controversy in the legit news media (i.e., not your Sunday afternoon blogger). Here is a columnby the Washington Post’s ombudsman addressing reader concerns about how frequently the Post quotes anonymous sources.
Given that the Post, and other publications, supposedly use anonymous sources only sparingly and with good cause, it makes sense that they would want to include their rationale for doing so along with the quote. Simply saying that it was an anonymous source, as in your example, invites the question, “Why did this source need to be anonymous?”
Newsweek’s editor wrote a page-long article describing their recent (say, two years ago) change in naming anonymous sources. Their policy was that “an anonymous source said” was not sufficient because it didn’t establish the credibility of the source and could lead to sloppy journalism and unverifiable stories. Therefore, they were only going to use sources who were credible experts and were going to identify those credentials in the article.
I seem to recall that this decision came about after some scandal, but don’t recall the specifics.