Great column by Glenn Greenwald about how unnamed sourcing often turns out to be wrong: Aside from falsity — and the fact that they become irreversibly lodged in our political culture as fact — what do all of these deceitful reports have in common? They’re all the by-product of granting anonymity to people and then [...]

Good piece in Foreign Affairs about the long history of news leaks. The author would like to see less of them: Some leaks are meant to be a straightforward pitch for or against a public policy. Leakers often pass along closely held documents, like that “confidential” McChrystal assessment of troop needs for Afghanistan, which found [...]

The Associated Press Stylebook offers concrete guidance on anonymous source use. Surprisingly, the stylebook did not dedicate an entry on the subject until 2004. That year’s entry reads: Use anonymous attribution only when essential and even then provide the most specific possible identification of the source. Simply quoting “a source,” unmodified, is almost always prohibited. [...]

Here’s the best argument I’ve read for why we should just shut up and accept anonymously sourced trade rumors in sports: Now, obvious problem #1 is that, if that were to truly be adopted, we’d have no trade rumors ever reported. We’d have a lot less reporting on evaluation of players. There would be much, [...]

Prominent reports based on anonymous sources have sometimes proven to be incorrect: Much of the O.J. Simpson reporting from unnamed sources was later deemed inaccurate.[2] Newsweek retracted a story about a Qur’an being flushed down a toilet that led to riots in the Middle East; the Qur’an desecration controversy of 2005 was based upon one [...]

The New York Times Public Editor points out that the Times doesn’t always follow its internal guidelines on not publishing anonymous personal allegations. If the subject is accused of a crime, the chances are far greater: It was no surprise that the case against Robert Joel Halderman, accused of blackmailing David Letterman, involved money and [...]

New research shows unnamed sourcing lowers credibility for readers: “Readers sometimes believe sources have a vested interest in being anonymous, and they may also interpret the use of un-named sources as reporter incompetence, according to the study. Either way, the result is lower credibility. The researchers, Miglena Sternadori and Esther Thorson, examined how readers reacted [...]

The Washington Post ombudsman is taking his paper to task for overusing unnamed sources as well: The Post has strict rules on the use of anonymous sources. They’re spelled out in detail — more than 3,000 words — in its internal stylebook. But some of those lofty standards are routinely ignored. Others are unevenly applied. [...]

Here’s a good reader from the military press on the motivation for government officials to speak anonymously to journalists.