Taking the easy way out

Barack Obama’s decision to release Bush administration memos that argue for the justification of torture techniques has been all over the news. Something else has raised a bit of ruckus in journalism academia circles, and that is Mike Allen’s account for Politico on how the decision was made.

Allen wrote a fairly short piece that led with the news that Obama consulted a wide range of sources before making his decision. In the fifth paragraph of this eight-paragraph story, Allen chose to “balance” the piece with anonymous quotes from a former Bush staffer who railed against the decision. The staffer accused the administration of putting America in danger, a fairly weighty claim.

“It’s damaging because these are techniques that work, and by Obama’s action today, we are telling the terrorists what they are,” the official said. “We have laid it all out for our enemies. This is totally unnecessary. … Publicizing the techniques does grave damage to our national security by ensuring they can never be used again — even in a ticking-time- bomb scenario where thousands or even millions of American lives are at stake.”

Whether it’s Politico or anyone else, anonymous sourcing is used far too often. Maybe it’s reporters dreaming of reaching their inner Woodward & Bernstein or winning a Pulitzer, or maybe we are just getting more lazy. But the Watergate investigation standard was always to use anonymity as a last resort, and to make sure the information was so vital that it justified, if not demanded, the use of off-the-record sourcing. But most importantly, Woodward & Bernstein went about verifying off-the-record information independently. Information given “on background” was a tool for investigation, not a fallback position for reporting.

We’ve fallen so far from that standard, especially when it comes to reporting on Washington. What Allen did here was a sign of the slipping standards for anonymous sourcing, but also a sign of the problems that come with the need to have “balanced” reporting (something I talked about at length in my previous entry). When your standard for good news is that it is balanced (even if it takes your story to the brink of distortion), what do you do when one side is on the record but another side won’t talk? You have to have something from another point of view to fend off claims of bias, and so you find yourself doing what Allen did – grant anonymity to cover yourself.

Even if the information the source gave Allen was vital, it was hardly verified. A nebulous claim that this makes us less safe can hardly be verified. It’s a fairly controversial statement that deserves to have a name attached to it. If the other point of view doesn’t have the courage to put a name to something controversial (but hardly enough that they are in danger for doing so) then it doesn’t belong in our journalism. One of the big things journalists have always done is name names. We don’t just put information out there, we say where we’re getting it from. Verification is the most important thing we do.

Allen published a followup piece justifying his decision, but from this corner it just muddied the waters. He cites the need for balance as a reason to go the anonymous route and talked about how he trusts the audience to decide for themselves given the information. But mostly it’s a justification that the people talking want to have their opinion without having to pay the consequences:

“I wasn’t surprised: While Karl Rove and former Vice President Dick Cheney have certainly let loose in public comments, most top Bush officials have been reluctant to go on the record criticizing Obama. They have new careers, and they know it’s a fight they’ll never win. He’s popular; they’re not — they get it.”

Glenn Greenwald hit on some other huge problems (such as the fact that Allen granted anonymity after the information was received) in an excellent piece on Salon. It’s worth a read.

The lack of accountability in our media – not just in Politico but across all media outlets and all platforms – could be a part of why our discourse is so poisoned. People want to have their say without paying the price; they want the rewards without the negative reaction. Early free speech advocates such as Milton, Mill, and even the Framers, understood that free speech furthers public discourse but comes with a cost. Some of our most passionate opinions about free speech itself comes from people who had to put their life on the line to utter such words. The former Bush official said something far less vital – and far less provable – and got anonymity.

Here’s the rule of thumb I give my students in regards to anonymity: If a source doesn’t want to speak on the record, it generally doesn’t belong in your story. There are exceptions for information that is so clearly vital that it needs to get out to the public, but it needs to be tandem with the sense that the source could be harmed greatly by having the information tied to them. But even if we get past the first hurdle, the information needs to be verified independently of the source.

Allen should have known better. His desire for balanced reporting, misguided standard aside, led him to fall into the Washington trap of “he said, she said” journalistic reporting. What takes place in our coverage is not democratic discourse and idea exchange, but a type of potshot discourse where different sides want to state their case but not be held accountable for their views.

The ethical standard using the universal maxim seems apply here. Would we want what Allen did to be the way news is done all the time? If not, the journalist has to think very carefully about whether it’s justifiable to do it in the story right in front of them.

With easy anonymity, readers are left trying to figure out what people stand for and who’s bringing what ideas to the table. How are they supposed to judge the words being said if they don’t know who to hold accountable? This isn’t the media serving the public need for information that helps them make democratic decisions; this is the media being consistently manipulated by those who understand the ramifications of this sham standard of balance.

Politicians and bureaucrats of all stripes do this, and it’s about time the media stuck to its guns and demanded that sources stand up for what the things they believe. If we don’t draw a line, it’s not the credibility of the anonymous sources that is harmed – it’s ours.