Great post about a Afghanistan/Pakistan article in the New York Times totally attributed to unnamed sources. The author counts 24 separate anonymous sources to which the report is attributed:
The source confusion is so rampant that the article approaches unreadability due to the difficulty of tracking who is who. For example, in the sentence “The discussions with Mr. Baradar and the other Taliban were in their early phases, but they seemed promising, the Afghan official said,” we have to go up several paragraphs to remind ourselves who this “person” “is.”
Surely we could get a few of these sources on-the-record. Perhaps we no longer try.
