President-elect Donald Trump is clearly antagonistic toward the mainstream media. That attitude is unlikely to change after Inauguration Day. His disdain for journalists and reluctance to release details about his finances and business ventures may force journalists to rely increasingly on anonymous sources, a strategy that reputable news organizations have long frowned upon.
So in the age of Trump, how should a reader approach coverage that relies primarily on anonymous sources?
Read the news like a spy.
By not naming a source, a journalist asks you to trust them. Did they talk to an intern or a policymaker? Every source has an agenda; if we as readers don't know the source we have a hard time parsing out and then evaluating that motivation. Remember the way the press covereddecisions that led to the 2003 Iraq War via articles based on unnamed sources, all with tall tales of Weapons of Mass Destruction?
Anonymous sources certainly have their place. During the Watergate scandal, Washington Postreporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein used a contact named Deep Throat to verify details about U.S. President Richard Nixon’s involvement in the break-in of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters, theft of top-secret documents and bugging of phones. Legitimate sources need to be protected from retaliation in return for informing the public, especially where national security whistle-blowing is concerned.
Many readers feel they have only two options: take the reporter’s word for it, or not. The result is a steady flow of insider stories that get blasted through aggregated media, which simply repeat others’ work. They then abandon the story as online roadkill for us to Tweet about. We tend to either label what we read as bogus, or scream at people who label what we believe as bogus.
The unique circumstances of Trump’s business background mean legitimate anonymous sources will likely have to play a significant role in reporting over the next four years. At the same time, the echo-like nature of the web, coupled with partisan outlets and equally partisan readers, opens the door to more unscrupulous or mistaken use of anonymous sources.
So how can readers exercise intelligent skepticism?
One way is to apply some of the same tests intelligence officers use to help them evaluate their own sources. Since an article’s unnamed sources are fully unknown to you as the reader, not every test applies, but thinking backwards from the information in front of you to who could be the source is a good start on forming a sense of how credible what you are being told might be...
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-media-trump-commentary-idUSKBN14O17D
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