Examples of poor anonymous sourcing
January 12th, 2010
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 unnamed military source.[3]
The L.A. Times retracted an article that implicated Sean “Diddy” Combs in the beating of Tupac Shakur.[4]
The original article was based on documents and a large assortment of unnamed sources. When reporting on the original story, the Associated Press noted that “[n]one of the sources was named.”[5]
– I wrote this portion of the Wikipedia entry on Journalism Sourcing
Categories: Uncategorized
