I intentionally added Fox to my Apple News app. The vast majority of the stories that pop up from them are hit pieces on other news organizations which generally use individual social media posts as original sources (for instance uproar over a WaPo piece about a militant conservative talk radio host in the Illinois town that the senate shooter came from), opinion pieces, stories referencing conservative groups' reporting (for instance parroting an opinion yesterday by Judicial Watch that Obama and the FBI cbotched the Hillary investigation), and, most substantially, softcore porn clickbait (xyz in hot water over racy dress).

The actual journalistic side of Fox News seems completely bereft of any actual journalism as far as I can tell.

I'm not so sure about all this. If the journalist could convince the "anonymous" source to identify himself or herself, or the journalist could find another, equally reliable, non-anonymous source, then sure, the journalist is guilty of laziness and has no good excuse for relying on an anonymous source.

But I assume that there are many instances in which a source will speak only on condition of anonymity. And the reason is usually pretty obvious. I don't need the WaPo to explain why a WH staffer insists on anonymity if the staffer is talking about turmoil in the White House.

And if there were a general presumption that stories that rely on anonymous sources are often made up, it surely would act as a flame ******ant on the reporting of legitimate news stories.

I also worry that the tolerance for anonymous sources would end up being applied even more unevenly than it is today. In other words, if journalistic ethics swung away from reliance on anonymous sources, then the NYT or WaPo would get pilloried every time it relied on anonymous sources, even by well meaning watchdogs on the left. Meanwhile, more dubious news sources like Breitbart would continue to pump out right wing pablum that cited to anonymous sources, and the consumers of that right wing pablum wouldn't GAF at all about Breitbart's reliance on anonymous sources.

This is great, I didn't know the guy who played Gollum did the voice too

Nah, the second sentence just describes how people behave trading.

It's really surprising all the pushback DV is getting for some pretty obvious (although unusually well-argued) points. It's generally true that stories don't get reported if they can't be adequately sourced, and to the extent a newspaper's (enforcement of) its sourcing policy is tightened, that means more stories will be unreportable. But that's the whole point of sourcing policies! If some stories can't be verified to the highest standard (a named source on the record whose qualifications and reliability are transparent to the reader), maybe they shouldn't be reported. Part of the cost of having reliable news is that some true but unverifiable claims don't show up in the news.

WH staffers is a good example. There's plenty of reasons to suspect that some recent stories about WH internal drama are disinformation planted by Trump-friendly insiders. It is, however, impossible to tell, because they all cite unnamed "staffers" and you can only guess at their motives and guess at what else they might have leaked to the media. That's bad.

Trump is more like a gutshot that somehow got there

wray was apparently chosen for fbi director because of his passion for prosecuting hate crimes perpetrated against christians (burning churches)

I'm sure this won't be a problem. Everything is fine.

Insanely Accurate Lip Synching Tech Could Turn Fake News Videos Into a Real Problem

We need to distinguish between an anonymous source whose reliability cannot be verified either by the media outlet or the reader and an anonymous source whose reliability can be verified by the media outlet, but not by the reader.

I have little tolerance for reliance on the former, and I take your point that WH staffers may not always be reliable sources. But we arguably lose too much if we discard the latter.

It's sort of like a brief exchange yesterday about geoengineering and how technology is ****ing awesome until you remember Donald Trump and a bunch of *******s like him might use it and then the inevitable gloom sets in. Machine learned facial renderings to mimic speech sounds boss until you realize by 2024 it's going to be used by 4channers to make Jason Kander plausibly recite an oath to NAMBLA on Facebook newsfeeds.

It's all investors, inc pension schemes. Not sure bond yields have ever been so low (in the UK anyway) and government back bonds can't go much lower, so it's really a strange time. You have to invest somewhere.

I have this feeling that one day fairly soon people will wonder how the US and UK stock markets reached such high points (not saying that there will be a crash necessarily, but maybe a fair sized fall and a long slow period of recovery).

This is extremely discouraging. Thirty years ago, I never would have guessed that our politics would be one of the first casualties of technological advancement.

As an example of the current environment and the danger about talking about anonymous sourcing anywhere near right-wingers: BroadwaySushy is someone who says he doesn't believe articles with unconfirmed sources, and has said that for awhile, about as long as Trump has been president probably. Until, that is, this:

The origin of this story about Clooney is a Life & Style Magazine article citing one anonymous "insider".

The only thing that can be achieved right now by giving these people the slightest bit of approval in their disingenuous arguments is further undermining of the free press. I get that DVaut is talking about the post-Trumpian world, but like, that's not the world we live in right now.

BS is hardly the only one. I don't know that many Trump supporters, but every one I do know claims to feel the same way as BS about anonymous sources.

You can criticize the abuse of anonymous sourcing in journalism and still disdain BroadwaySushy. Donald Trump supporters also tut-tutted in Barack Obama's direction for taking health care industry dollars to give a speech to them; is that a great idea for Democrats to do now? What else do idiots get to draw all the boundaries around? If even one Donald Trump supporter gets to take turn on the pedestal and pretend like they have virtues for a few minutes, well forgot it, we'll show them by approving none of it?

Abuse of anonymous sources in modern media is a valid criticism on it own merits regardless of what a bunch of hypocritical vapid Trumpkins think or how they're disingenuously arguing at the time.

The other thing I'd add is that there's a difference between whistleblowing anonymous sources and propaganda-spewing anonymous sources. One of those has a damn good reason to be anonymous, but an anonymous source saying "hey torture saved a lot of lives and gave us lots of great intel" or "we're totally sure that drone strike killed no civilians" should obviously be viewed with more skepticism. In other words,

+1.

Sure, you should just know ahead of time what your arguments are going to be used in service of by others.

Oh, well, as long as we're clear that exactly zero Trump supporters actually give less legitimacy to news stories because they are anonymously sourced, I'm good. We all agree they don't give a ****, and don't really even know what an anonymous source is? Twitter is full of people ripping the media on Don Jr. being attakced by anonymous sources WHEN HE HIMSELF IS THE SOURCE.

This isn't exactly how it works. Herman and Chomsky wrote the seminal text here, Manufacturing Discontent. Somehow they're both still alive and Herman just wrote an article about fake news and the NYT: http://dissidentvoice.org/2017/07/fa...mes-1917-2017/.

This might seem like a non sequitur, but a bunch of the anonymous sources they quote are government sources tossing out crap for propaganda purposes.

This sounds to me like a perfect case for the political outlook you discussed a few days ago. Stuff like ignoring (for a while) a potential criticism even tho you think it's valid, because discussing it might help the fight to end free press, sounds like a pretty good candidate.

People were making terrible disingenuous arguments on the internet before Trump and they will be after him too. This is inevitable. It doesn't seem like a good basis from which to evaluate the strength of an argument. It's an actual example of the ad hominem fallacy: the argument is bad because of who uses it.

Journalists actually already have standards for this! Seriously!

https://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/20...ty-to-sources/

Is the source vulnerable to grave threats or repercussions? Facing jailtime or other very serious consequences for speaking out against the powerful? Can the information be acquired anywhere else?

If the answers to the questions of these is yes in the first two, or no to the last, then we have a valid case (among some other justifications) for using anonymous sources.

If it's a background briefing, the source is eager to talk but simply wants to be anonymous, the source is powerful, the source is trading in any kind of opinion or speculation or any sort of second-hand information where the journalist isn't seeking out the original source -- there's very little justification.

I am not arguing we normatively do away with anonymous sources but I'm confident a huge percentage (just go Google away and check for yourself) fit into the broad category of completely unjustifiable cases where the article is self-evidently in contradiction of good journalist practices (e.g., it's clear the source is simply spreading opinion or a very powerful official or it's a spox background briefing and the journalist gives zero indication why their source should be anonymous other than its simply convenient).

Embracing low quality journalism in order to save it is a Pyrrhic victory. There's no real justification for pulling punches calling Sarah Palin a racist because you might be wrong about her intent in sharing an article with 14 Words in the headlines that might be coded to appeal to white supremacists because Sarah Palin is a right wing propagandist that trades in racism either way.

So the situation is not comparable. "We need to contradict every dumbass Trump argument and let the media revel in anonymous gossip" gets us nothing of value; Trump supporters aren't going to magically come to their senses and start defending the value of a free press. Whereas vigilantly policing right-wing propagandists minimally at least shows black people we value their dignity, if nothing else.

Most conversations we have about anonymous sources (including some of this one!) lack this kind of nuance and distinction between legitimate and illegitimate uses of them, though. By responding to Donald Trump saying "anonymous sources giving accurate reports of my son's nefarious meetings with Russians are FAKE NEWS" with "the man has a point" - no, he doesn't, you two are talking about completely different things.

I'm not saying we let the media go HAM with anonymous sources, I'm saying we don't grant these idiots their false premise. And yes, my goalposts are probably moving a little as I've been swayed a bit by these particular posts:

These are good points.

Donald Trump supporters don't care at all either way about anonymous sources, their motivation for media criticism is borne entirely out of how much they are parroting talking points servile to right wing interests. Their criticism or embrace of anonymous sources is not worth paying attention to either way.

This take on journalistic standards seems non-controversial. It falls far short of an all-out war on anonymous sourcing.