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When the Post Banned Anonymous Sources
More than 30 years ago, shortly before Watergate, the Washington Post tried to do something about them. Ben Bradlee, then the paper's executive editor, decided that the Post would no longer publish information from unnamed sources. Bradlee was a high-energy competitor who hated to be beaten on a story. But he was also an innovator.
The experiment was understandable. It came during the Nixon administration, a turbulent era that witnessed all the pitfalls of namelessness, including high officials flimflamming the news media. Henry Kissinger, at the time Nixon's chief foreign policy adviser, was adept at giving one group of reporters an "inside tip" on an anonymous basis; an hour later, in his oracular voice, enhanced by his carefully preserved Germanic accent, he would say something entirely different to a favored reporter. When it came to the Post, other Nixon officials often made life difficult for the paper's reporters, sometimes hiding behind the label "an unnamed source" when releasing a statement of dubious truth.
Finally, Bradlee had had enough. He announced the "no more unnamed sources" policy to the newsroom. From now on, when an official said, "This briefing is for background only," meaning the information couldn't be attributed to a named source, Post reporters were to walk out. Or if a Cabinet officer said, "This will have to be off the record" – meaning it couldn't be used at all – Post reporters were to say politely that they were not allowed to listen....
Murrey Marder, one of our diplomatic correspondents, told me recently that during the noble experiment a fellow diplomatic reporter announced at a background briefing that he couldn't take anything from an unnamed source. He walked out of the room. But nobody followed him. Post reporters felt hamstrung by the policy and made their feelings known....
The experiment ended after two days.
http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=3946
Journalists won't do it, but it would be a simple thing for the Obama administration to stop this.
