TRANSCRIPT OF THE PODCAST ON ANONYMITY IN JOURNALISM

I'm George Gladney. I'm a professor of Journalism at the University of Wyoming in the United States and earlier this week I was in Lviv at a training session with some young journalists, trying to give them some advice on journalistic techniques and a question came up about an issue that poses quite a controversy among journalists in the United States and that relates to the use of anonymous sources by a journalist.

The reason why this is a particular timely topic today is that in the past few years we have had some very high profile scandals that have resulted from the use of anonymous sources. Probably the most prominent case involved a reporter at the New York Times by the name of Jayson Blair, and it turned out that this was a young reporter who had star status and was greatly valued in the news room. But unfortunately, what he had been doing was using anonymous sources as a way to mask the fact that there were no sources at all. What he was doing was fabricating stories whole cloth - inventing sources, if you will, and this came to light and the end result was that he was fired, of course, and he brought down with him the editor of the New York Times and the managing editor of the New York Times. There have been other similar cases involving Stephen Glass at the New Republic, Jack Kelley, a veteran reporter and columnist with the national newspaper USA Today, and Mike Barnicle, a columnist at the Boston Globe.

This issue drew my attention, and I formulated a hypothesis about it, because I followed the press very closely and it seemed to me that in the past ten years there's been a significant change in the way that the American press uses anonymous sources. And so I conducted a study with the help of some colleagues at Ryerson University in Toronto, and we examined a number of newspapers from ten years ago and compared how anonymous sources were used at that time with today. And my hypothesis was that today newspapers are much more likely than they were ten years ago to be reluctant to grant anonymity to sources - to not make it not so easy for a source to be allowed to remain nameless - and that when anonymity is granted the newspaper story will state explicitly the reason why the anonymous source requested anonymity and the reason why it was granted. So for example an anonymous source will tell a reporter, "Well I don't want you to use my name because if it's known that I was the one who gave you this information, I will lose my job. I'll be fired." or maybe, "Me or my family will be put in danger," or perhaps a source will say that it's against his employers policy to speak on record to the press. So when we look at the results of this study it does confirm this hypothesis. There has indeed been a significant change in the way American news media are approaching or handling the use of anonymous sources.

When you think about it, what are the pros and cons of the use of anonymous sources? Probably the strongest argument in the favor of use of anonymous sources is that sometimes this is the only way to get an important story. Seeing this way, it is a last resort but a method that sometimes is legitimate, but there are a lot of reasons why reporters should be very cautious in the use of anonymous sources and I'll mention a few of these. First of all, of course, you run into the problem of reporters fabricating stories. The scandals I mentioned earlier, all would not have been possible if the reporters weren't able to use anonymous sources. The use of anonymous sources also decreases public trust in the media. The news media loses some of its credibility for lack of accountability. Also, you have to wonder what the motivations are of your sources, particularly your sources that refuse to have their names associated with the story. You have to wonder what purpose or unstated purpose they have in providing you this information when they're not willing to state it on the record. There's one last concern that comes out of a court case in Minnesota, where a reporter had pledged anonymity to a source, and that reporter was later pressured or forced by a court to reveal the identity of that source and a court ruled that a newspaper reporter could be held liable for breach of contract in such a case, so this poses some legal danger to newspaper and news media outlets that promise anonymity but then find later that they have to break that promise.

So I think that this is something that is certainly on the minds of news editors and reporters and news producers and news directors in the United States and I think we're seeing some improvement if my study carries any weight. Thank you.