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Published on 08/03/1998 All articles from this issue

The benefits, drawbacks of anonymous sources

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By David L. Grey

Media Watch

"If they don't want to be quoted on record, we don't have much use for them." So says and believes Los Altos Town Crier Editor Bruce Barton when asked to lay out local policy regarding reporting anonymous sources in news and other stories.

End of this story and column? Hardly. In fact, use of anonymous, or confidential, sources is one of the more timely controversies facing journalists and, therefore, news consumers. And it reveals a lot about a news organization's self-perception of its role in a community and society.

It may be self-evident to say that Washington, D.C. and Los Altos are mighty different kinds of news towns. But even the wagons circling the White House are driven by drivers of differing press stripes and not all weeklies are as down-home local as the Town Crier. (Two such area "alternative" papers which usually feast on anonymity: South Bay's Metro and the San Francisco Bay Guardian.)

There is no rightness or wrongness here. Just difference, and issues of credibility.

It is especially at the latter where Barton says he draws the line. He wants his paper and the sources cited on its pages to be as accountable/reliable as possible; protecting name identities does not do much for the credibility index-particularly recently when journalists and the quasi-press are near the bottom of professional reputation charts.

Infrequent use of anonymous sources is a fairly easy stance to take when your news mandate is mostly recording everyday community activities -the daily and periodic tallying and translating of names, places and events and a selected few other ongoing happenings.

In Los Altos and nearby there are relatively few risks to safety or fears of retribution or lost reputation in naming names. When super-sensitivity occasionally arises, as involving serious harassment charges or heated neighborhood disputes, public records and forums make who says what about whom typically open book and over-ripe (if sometimes unappetizing) for narration and critique.

So there can be caution to the degree that some stories that should be told are not. And on a riskier flip side, of course, there are those that should not be told - or told as packaged- that are.

Unnamed sources are not always a central concern, but often in the competitive world of news, their lure is great. And herein, one might say, lies a rub.

Justifications? Sure. From long before the 1970s President Nixon and Watergate sagas to today's fascinations over Whitewater, history has to be followed as it marches. In other words: ideally long enough before it does not make any difference except to historians.

Steep prices, therefore, must at times be paid to live in a democratic and competitive and capitalistic union. Shielding news sources has been written into state constitutions and typically further sheltered by the courts in the names of liberties of free speech and press-or also protecting our needs, and sometimes only just wants, to know about communities and societies at all levels.

Speech is at least silver while silence (in news sources) may at times be golden and equally as precious. In our democracy, we accept such news diversity and, in return, apologize not in ever-assessing the possible rationales and consequences of difference.

David L. Grey, Ph.D., is professor emeritus of journalism at San Jose State University where for 24 years he taught and did research on media law and ethics. He is a Mountain View resident.