Sources say
Becket Adams
In journalism, anonymous sources should be used only as a last resort and only to underpin hard evidence and on-the-record statements.
A story based entirely on the say-so of a nameless source or sources simply can’t be trusted, especially if the story fails to include proof backing the chief allegation. We simply need more than the word of someone whose name we don’t even know and whose credibility we can’t possibly question or confirm.
In other words, don’t do what reporter Seymour Hersh, the Hill, and so many others have done recently. Don’t publish tantalizing “bombshell” news reports based solely on the word of nameless sources. It’s too dangerous a thing to introduce anonymously sourced allegations into the public sphere, especially if there is no hard evidence to back said allegations.
“Last June,” reported this month in his Substack newsletter, “[U.S. Navy] divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planned the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines.”
He adds, “Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.”
Hersh continues, writing, “Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best” stop Vladimir Putin from weaponizing “natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.”
It’s an explosive (Har! Har!) allegation, one that, if true, would carry with it major political and international ramifications. But this is a big “if.”
Hersh’s story — all 5,000-plus words of it — is based entirely on a lone anonymous source “with direct knowledge of the operational planning.” That’s it. Hersh supplies no further evidence proving unequivocally the United States planned and executed what would be rightly viewed as an “act of war.”
On the other hand, White House officials, including Biden administration spokeswoman Adrienne Watson, have gone on the record to dispute the charge, characterizing it as “false and complete fiction.”
Look. Hersh is not exactly a slouch of a reporter. In 1968, for example, the Pentagon covered up the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, in which U.S. soldiers murdered an estimated 500 Vietnamese villagers. It wasn’t until Hersh uncovered the slaughter, reporting it in painstaking detail backed by evidence and testimony, that the public even heard of the small village. It may be he has a similarly major scoop with the pipeline attack, but we, the public, simply can’t take his report as gospel. We simply need more evidence.
Is it possible the U.S. blew up the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline? Perhaps. Is it possible everything happened exactly as Hersh’s “source” claims? Perhaps. But we simply can’t know, precisely because we can’t rely only on the word of a nameless official. To do so runs the risk of disaster.
After all, reporters have been known to abuse the “anonymous sources” trope to push an agenda. See: PBS anchor and NBC News correspondent Yamiche Alcindor, who almost certainly invents anonymous “sources” from whole cloth.
“I had an immigrant tell me, an immigrant mother tell me, ‘I see President Biden more as a father than as a president,’” Alcindor once said in reference to the Biden administration’s immigration policies. “Earlier, I had someone else say, ‘I think he has a bigger heart than President Trump.’”
Then, during the White House’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, Alcindor said, “This is America’s longest war. This is a 20-year war spanning multiple presidencies. And President Biden didn’t take this decision lightly, sources tell me.”
Elsewhere, after Vice President Kamala Harris told immigrants, “Don’t come [to the U.S.],” Alcindor landed another exclusive scoop: Anonymous sources say the administration didn’t really mean what it clearly said.
“Experts tell me, and lawyers tell me, that even though President Biden is continuously saying, ‘Don’t come,’ his actions are speaking louder than his words,” she said. “He is saying, ‘Welcome, come in. We’re going to put you in facilities. We’ll find something to do.’”
It’s amazing how these anonymously sourced remarks keep lining up exactly with Democratic talking points!
And these are just the little media scandals that can happen thanks to the overreliance on anonymous sources. There are far greater, and far more dangerous, examples of newsrooms pushing supposedly damning “information” based on nameless officials.
Remember, the Associated Press, citing a lone anonymous source, reported last year that Russia had launched missiles into Poland. If true, this would have rightly been viewed as an act of war. As it turns out, though, the Associated Press got it wrong. The sourcing was incorrect. The Associated Press was forced to publish a retraction, eventually firing a reporter designated to play the scapegoat.
This was a major muck-up, one that could’ve resulted in serious consequences, and all because a newsroom chose to go with an anonymous source rather than secure hard evidence.
In a comparable situation with slightly smaller stakes, the Hill and others reported this month that Chinese spy balloons “flew over the U.S.” at least three times during the Trump administration. The source of this allegation? You guessed it, an anonymous government official. The immediate takeaway in political and media circles was this: The Biden administration did not, in fact, fail this year in its handling of a Chinese spy balloon it allowed to traverse the U.S. After all, this sort of thing happened fairly often under former President Donald Trump.
But then came the on-the-record comments. Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command, revealed later that U.S. officials discovered the existence of previous Trump-era balloon flights only after the U.S. military downed the balloon discovered during the Biden administration, basing this determination on information gathered from the balloon that was just recently caught and exposed.
“VanHerck said US intel agencies pieced together that China had sent 3 previous balloons into US that were not detected,” Foreign Policy national security reporter Jack Detsch reports.
All this, and only after the “Trump did it, too” narrative cemented itself into the public discourse.
In scenarios involving anonymously sourced “bombshells” news reports, the best course of action is to play the wait-and-see game. Wait for evidence. Otherwise, you run the risk of embracing a half-truth, if not an outright falsehood.
As the old journalism cliche goes: If your mother says she loves you, check it out.
Horseshoes and hand grenades
It’s a small thing but a weird thing nonetheless.
Observe this Feb. 7 Axios news blurb (emphasis added): “2022 Senate almost-winner Mandela Barnes is launching a PAC to help candidates who are written off by institutional supporters.”
“Almost-winner”? In what universe have we ever referred to the losing candidate as the “almost-winner”? Imagine a major newsroom referring to failed Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake as an “almost-winner.” You can’t, can you?
Similarly, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) recently referred to the Hunter Biden laptop scandal as “half-fake.”
“We could be talking about the cost of prescription drugs,” she complained during a congressional hearing, “abortion rights, civil rights, voting rights, but instead, we’re talking about Hunter Biden’s half-fake laptop story.”
What is “half-fake”? Any relation to “almost-winner”?