The New Dark Age

31 March 2016 — FAIR

A new report from FAIR looks at a year’s worth of anonymity in the New York Times, with media critic Reed Richardson taking an in-depth look at how unnamed sources were used in the paper in 2015. His research substantiates that the observation Times public editor Margaret Sullivan made in 2014 (12/29/14) is still true: “Anonymity continues to be granted to sources far more often than a last-resort basis would suggest.” Among Richardson’s findings:

• In 2015, New York Times staff wrote 1,538 articles that acknowledged using anonymous sourcing. Such stories were published almost every day–only 12 days did not see a Times reporter openly using an anonymous source–with a peak of 14 anonymous-source stories appearing on September 23, 2015.

• The Times‘ website and print edition ran more than 3,800 wire service stories that used anonymous sourcing. Combined with stories authored by Times reporters, the Times last year published more than 5,300 stories last year with anonymous sourcing–or nearly 15 per day. (This doesn’t include stories that used anonymous sources without explicitly disclosing them as such, which would add hundreds more to the total, by a conservative estimate.)

• Of the Times-authored stories with explicit anonymity, 190 violated the paper’s guidelines by failing to offer any justification for not using the source’s name, while another 133 resorted to the unhelpful tautology that the source was “not authorized to talk to the media.”

• The Times‘ Foreign desk provided the largest share of Times-authored anonymous-source articles, with 41 percent of the total. This was followed by Business (26 percent), Metro (13 percent) and National (10 percent). All other departments of the paper together provided 10 percent of the anonymous-source stories.

• Nearly one in five—19 percent—of these anonymous-source stories ran on the front page (A1) of the Times‘ print edition. Another 12 percent were published on the front page of a section, like Business Day.

• In 2015, 367 different Times reporters identified sources as being anonymous, but more than 200 of them granted anonymity three times or less during the year. There were 55 Times reporters who averaged at least one declared anonymous source a month last year.

• Eric Schmitt, the Times reporter who had the most anonymous-source stories in 2015 (62–36 of which were on the front-page), quoted an unnamed US government official in three out of every four of his stories last year.

Richardson’s report, “Journalism’s Dark Matter: Uncovering a Year of Anonymous Sources at the New York Times,” is available at FAIR.org. A searchable database of every New York Times anonymous-source story from 2015 is available as a Google Doc. You can contact him at reedfrichardson@gmail.com or @reedfrich.

Reed Richardson is a media critic and writer whose work has appeared in The Nation, AlterNet, Harvard University’s Nieman Reports and the textbook Media Ethics (Current Controversies).

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