Conservative Advocate: Those anonymous sources
The disclosure that former associate director of the FBI W. Mark Felt was the famous “Deep Throat,” who encouraged Washington Post reporters Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein to continue probing the Nixon administration’s links to the Watergate break-in, has inspired a huge amount of commentary on that whole brouhaha.
Was Felt a patriot or a traitor? Were Woodward and Bernstein relentless reporters whose intrepid investigations brought down the Nixon administration, or does that honor rightly belong to Judge John Sirica, who threatened the burglars with 40-year prison sentences until one of them cracked and sang like a canary? What does the episode tell us about the importance of anonymous sources in the development of news stories indispensable to a democratic society?
It’s that latter question on which I will dwell for a moment. We have been told repeatedly in the past couple of weeks the “Deep Throat” story proves, if any further proof were needed, how indispensable anonymous sources are if Washington reporters are going to be able to discharge their vital task of telling the American people what their rulers are really up to. And certainly it is undeniable that information obtained from such sources — and obtainable only by promising anonymity to the informant — can sometimes have major, and highly beneficial, consequences.
The media themselves have harped on this point so insistently that one wonders whether their consciences harbor a teeny residuum of doubt on the subject.
Certainly there is plenty of room for doubt. Let us assume for a moment that there lurks, somewhere in the Washington bureau of some major newspaper or TV network, a reporter who is a closet liberal, and who sincerely believes President George W. Bush is unrelievedly bad news for the country. (I realize how implausible such an assumption may seem, but bear with me.)
It is at least theoretically possible that such a person might simply invent a malignant motive for some action of Bush’s and write an article “revealing” it, and attribute the revelation to “a source close to the president, who spoke only on condition of anonymity.” If such a misdeed strikes you as totally inconceivable, let us decorate it with a bit of parsley: Let us suppose the reporter sincerely believes the accusation is true, and even possesses what he (or she) thinks is proof of it, but for some reason cannot disclose the “proof.”
Is there any way that you or I could know if, in fact, the accusation is wholly false? No. If we believe what we read in the papers, we have no choice but to swallow the lie whole.
We can complicate (and thereby improve) the hypothesis to our taste. Any reporter who has a theory of some event that puts President Bush (or Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid — this game can be played by anybody) in a bad light has only to lunch with some old friend who has a government job. A little artful questioning and the reporter can write, with strict truthfulness, that “a source close to the White House,” or “a knowledgeable source on Capitol Hill,” declared that “the evidence points squarely to …” whatever the reporter wants it to point to. In other words, just find a “source” willing to let you put words in his mouth.
In the far more likely event that the reporter’s best and most numerous contacts are with people who share his (or her) political views, it is child’s play to write an article reflecting those common views and attribute it to “sources in a position to know.” But what are the biases, the prejudices, the interests of such sources? We are never told.
That is why the grand old journalistic tradition was to source every statement, and always identify one’s sources. Real news was more difficult to come by and report, in those days; but at least the reader knew what he was getting. Today, we must settle for a pig in a poke, and can’t even be sure it’s a pig.
(William Rusher is a Distinguished Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy.)