Pincus on Anonymous Sources
Media Blog
Stephen Spruiell Reporting
Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus on anonymous sources (from the Summer 2005 issue of Nieman Reports):
But no matter what legal protections exist, journalists
should pause before handling information received from
people who demand anonymity. Reporters should avoid
promising anonymity to sources if it is being offered
simply to encourage the source to say something in a
dramatic or damaging way that the source would not say on
the record. This use of anonymity harms the profession
and diminishes the value of the confidentiality given to
those who are whistleblowers—people who risk their jobs
and jail for what they may believe is a higher cause.
Walter Pincus with Jim VandeHei in the Washington Post today:
<<<
A classified State Department memorandum central to a federal leak investigation contained information about CIA officer Valerie Plame in a paragraph marked "(S)" for secret, a clear indication that any Bush administration official who read it should have been aware the information was classified, according to current and former government officials.
Plame — who is referred to by her married name, Valerie Wilson, in the memo — is mentioned in the second paragraph of the three-page document, which was written on June 10, 2003, by an analyst in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), according to a source who described the memo to The Washington Post.
The paragraph identifying her as the wife of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV was clearly marked to show that it contained classified material at the "secret" level, two sources said. The CIA classifies as "secret" the names of officers whose identities are covert, according to former senior agency officials.
Anyone reading that paragraph should have been aware that it contained secret information, though that designation was not specifically attached to Plame's name and did not describe her status as covert, the sources said.
>>>
Pincus, of course, was one of the reporters who granted Joe Wilson anonymity so he could leak his lies about Niger and damage the Bush adminstration — that is, before Wilson's ego demanded that he reveal himself in all his manifold splendor on the op-ed pages of the NY Times.
And when administration officials tried to tell Pincus that he'd been had — that Wilson's wife had engineered the trip — Pincus didn't write about it because, according to his piece in Nieman Reports, he "did not believe it true that she had arranged his Niger trip." So this is how he operates: Give the anti-administration guy the benefit of the doubt, but immediately discount the White House official trying to set the record straight. And even though the former was lying and the latter was telling the truth, Pincus is still playing the same game. This story, much discussed today, does nothing but fuel pointless speculation. But that's the name of the Plame game.
"[A]void promising anonymity to sources if it is being
offered simply to encourage the source to say something
in a dramatic or damaging way," Pincus wrote.
Except, you know, if it damages the Bush administration.
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