Unattributed sourcing is unique to DC. The media better wise up that politicians are playing them for fools before the whole country starts to tune the whole bunch of them out.
From today's WSJ:
Why Washington Keeps Us in the Dark
By SHIRLEY CHRISTIAN
Since the Lewinsky scandal began, critics of the news media have pointed to the fuzzy sourcing of many stories on the subject. But the American public should know that journalists did not create this system. Our elected officials, their staffs and the Washington bureaucracy created it. It bears no relation to the way the press and government deal with each other in real places, like Brooklyn or Kansas. I even found it easier to find reliable and straightforward sources in the Sandinistas' Nicaragua and Augusto Pinochet's Chile than I found as a correspondent in Washington.
Everybody in Washington seems to know what the sourcing language means and can usually determine the source of a particular piece of information or at least why it is being floated. But voters and taxpayers outside the Beltway are left to wonder what the news means.
The year I spent as a Washington correspondent was the low point of my 30 years in journalism, an education in the weird ways of information gathering in the nation's capital. Most information in Washington comes without a name attached. Almost everybody in Washington wants to leak to journalists and influence what they write or broadcast without taking the responsibility of being quoted directly. I have no idea how this began, but the extent to which it is imbedded in Washington mores became obvious some years ago when a major newspaper announced, with a great show of righteousness, that it would no longer honor government officials' requests for anonymity. It took only a few weeks for the paper quietly to concede defeat.
There are a few exceptions to the anonymity rule. They include members of Congress announcing a legislative initiative, the president's news conferences and appearances on Sunday morning television--all staged events. Typical, however, is the statement attributed to a "senior administration official," which means an assistant secretary of a cabinet-level department, or higher. At times the sourcing is embarrassingly flimsy, with information coming from very junior staffers on Capitol Hill not in a position to know what they are claiming.
Most good news organizations try to pin down these sources in such a way that the reader can at least tell which side of an issue the source is on--but that is often the very thing the source is trying to prevent. Such people often are looking for ways to influence events, or even trying to influence their own bosses.
Sometimes vaguely identified sources are very reliable, or at least very close to the horse's mouth. "Someone close to" an official or politician usually means the person himself or herself has spoken. But an experience I had in 1986 with Oliver L. North illustrates how complicated such a situation can become. Because I was acquainted with Mr. North, and because he had liked a book I had written on Nicaragua, my newspaper, the New York Times, had me fly back from Buenos Aires, where I was then assigned, to try to see him after he was fired and Iran-Contra began to unravel.
I arrived very late on the night before Thanksgiving, and late the next morning drove to his house in Virginia. Mr. North buzzed me through the security gate, but before I could park and get out of the car he was telling me that everything, everything, was off the record. "Even your being inside this yard is off the record," he declared in a congenial but firm tone. I asked myself what I was supposed to do. Stand on principle? Tell him I didn't accept those terms? And drive off with nothing? I reminded him that I had spent about 15 hours on airplanes for the chance to talk with him. That seemed to please, even amuse, him, but he didn't budge. At the same time, he seemed ready to explode with opinions about the way he had been treated, particularly by Attorney General Edwin Meese.
I whipped out a notebook. Can't we work out something on sourcing? I asked. How about "someone close to . . ."? He was quick with a comeback. "You're close to me," he declared, meaning--I assumed--that we were standing a few feet apart. For someone who had been in a Bolivian coca jungle 72 hours earlier, this was getting a bit complicated. Compared with officials in Washington, Bolivian coca farmers are forthcoming. If you put out the effort to find them, they will tell you how much coca they plant, how little they paid for it, and how to spell their names. They think planting coca is their God-given right and cooperating with the free press their responsibility. Why can't anyone in Washington get this straight?
I eventually left with what seemed like nothing. My editors, however, were pleased that I had gotten through the gate. They saw it as a breakthrough that was bound to lead to payoffs later. I was less convinced. I had talked to Mr. North a few times before and was always amazed at how little information he gave me even when he was supposedly trying to be helpful. At one point, an editor suggested that I get Mr. North to give me advance word on the allegations about him that were likely to come leaking out in the coming days. This editor had deluded himself into believing that the target of an investigation would collaborate in his own unmasking. He had definitely been in Washington too long.
The law of supply and demand helps explain what goes on in Washington. The capital has an oversupply of journalists. If one reporter won't play the source's game, another will. A longtime source once apologized for not giving me a story because, he said, a reporter for another paper had promised front-page play if he gave her the story exclusively. I've never worked for a paper that would allow me to promise space on page one, but some reporters apparently have that power. What petty stuff, logical people will say. But it is the stuff of day-to-day Washington journalism and politics.
What Washington journalists ought to do is make themselves scarce. Go cover Brooklyn and Kansas--or even Bolivia.
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Ms. Christian is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has reported from Latin America, Washington and the United Nations, as well as from Kansas and Brooklyn. |
