Complete Story
07/20/2017
When to trust a story that uses unnamed sources
The various investigations into the Trump administration and its alleged ties to Russia are hard to follow. The allegations are sometimes muddled, the probes are still ongoing, and all sides in the dispute are leaking information that favors their points of view. These stories are also hard to follow because few officials are willing to put their names behind their claims and comments, leading to a stream of stories rife with unnamed sources.
What’s a reader to do? Well, here’s a guide to unnamed sources in government/politics/Washington stories — who they are, how reporters use them, and how to tell if you should trust what they say. Having covered Congress, the White House, several presidential campaigns and briefly the Education and State departments, I have begged (usually unsuccessfully) many sources to allow me to use their names, written a fair number of stories with unnamed sources, and spent a lot of time trying to decode stories with unnamed sources written by other journalists. For this piece, I also consulted other journalists and political types who have served in senior staff roles on campaigns, on Capitol Hill and in presidential administrations.
This is part one of two. I’ll cover some general principles for reading anonymously sourced stories here and break down the different types of such sources in part two. I wrote this piece because of all the Trump-Russia stories, but the rules, terms and designations apply to other Washington stories as well.
This is not a story meant to condone or encourage the use of unnamed sources. While President Trump and his defenders have bashed the use of anonymous sources, some journalists themselves also say the practice is overused. They argue that using unnamed sources limits journalistic accountability, since readers and other reporters can’t easily check the accuracy of an account if they don’t know where it comes from. Unnamed sources are often a feature of stories that I would argue are more about reporters showing how savvy and in the know they are than truly informing and enlightening readers.
