Defending Anonymous

The past couple of weeks have brought renewed focus on the practices and practitioners of journalism.

First, there was Newsweek magazine's small item, attributed to an unnamed Pentagon source, claiming that at least some portions of a copy of the Koran had been flushed down a toilet at the Guantanamo Bay prison. Then, it was former FBI deputy director Mark Felt being identified as "Deep Throat," the anonymous source of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and The Washington Post in their Watergate stories that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

These revelations have given voice to attacks against the use of unnamed (or anonymous or confidential) sources. And, not surprisingly, most of the objection comes from ideological conservatives who have been gnashing their teeth for some five decades because Sen. Joseph McCarthy was exposed as a charlatan, the Vietnam War was denounced as a dishonestly executed debacle and the corrupt Nixon administration was brought to its knees.

Despite a media and government pile-on casting the magazine's claim as inaccurate and irresponsible journalism, the Newsweek report was essentially correct. The Koran was repeatedly desecrated at Guantanamo—kicked, torn, thrown, urinated on. But maybe not actually flushed. A distinction without a difference.

Meanwhile, Mark Felt, Woodward and Bernstein's confidential source for information (and not for quotes), is being vilified by the conservatives as unpatriotic for helping guide the reporters through the Nixonian criminality.

In the wake of the exposures of high crimes and misdemeanors by Nixon and his agents and cronies, the conventional wisdom was that journalism and journalists were beginning to ride a crest of influence and power. Journalism schools grew, 60 Minutes became a top-rated television show. In fact, the Watergate exposures were the high watermark for journalism. Its influence has been declining ever since the day Nixon raised his arms in the helicopter door and went not so quietly into the night.

Significantly, the wane of journalism's influence had nothing to do with the use of anonymous sources. There is nothing wrong with using unnamed sources, and a strong case can be made that if print and television news were really doing their Constitutionally protected jobs, they would be utilizing more, not fewer, confidential sources. That would mean that they were acting as society's watchdogs, they would be providing a voice (and protection) for whistleblowers, they would be diligently investigating corrupt business practices, environmental destruction, police and prison abuse and inept physicians, lawyers and judges—instead of climbing into bed with them.

Newspapers are often little more than printed versions of Inside Edition and the Home Shopping Network, their reporters little more than stenographers, press release re-writers, professional suck-ups and mourners of dead dogs.

For the past 40 years or more, we have heard the steady drum beat of protest from the conservatives about the dominance of the "liberal news media." It is a base canard. Ownership of American (and foreign) news organizations is overwhelmingly conservative and Republican—and has been for decades. Only a handful could be properly perceived as liberal, and even then only because of stands on race, civil liberties and human rights. Virtually all news organizations are extraordinarily pro-business, pro-family, pro-religion, pro-school, pro-national security, pro-military, pro-America.

The problem for the conservatives is that virtually all news organizations are also pro-truth and pro-Constitution.

But with the incessant intimidation from conservatives, the likelihood of recurrence of the kind of time-consuming, deep-digging investigative reporting demonstrated by The Washington Postin its Watergate coverage is almost nonexistent. Which is just the way newspaper publishers and their conservative friends who run businesses want it.

For one thing, investigative reporting takes time and money. It takes courage and steadfastness from editors and publishers besieged by influential targets of investigations, their friends and threatening lawyers. Additionally, really good reporters are hard to control. You never know what uncomfortable information they might turn up.

The best and most successful investigative reporting usually comes from months and often years of beat reporting, networking contacts, cultivating sources, developing trust. That's rarely accomplished when chained to the office, sitting at a computer terminal fishing databases and telephoning P.R. firms.

It wasn't long after Watergate that newsroom debates began centering on unnamed sources. Ethics codes were adopted to forbid their use. Knowledgeable sources refused to jeopardize their careers, families and lives by going public to correct wrongdoing. Meaningful, compelling, valuable investigative reporting began to decline. For the vast majority of newspapers in America it is now moribund. And so are their circulations.

Interestingly, the recent decline in the reputation and standing of journalism has come not from errors by investigative reporters and their use of confidential sources, but from popular columnists taking money from right-wing politicos to write White House propaganda, reporters plagiarizing or fabricating stories, and conservative political stooges posing as journalists to ask questions at White House press conferences.

And journalists exposed them, just as they did McCarthyism, Vietnam, Nixon and Guantanamo.

We just need much more of it.

Whaddayahear?

Numerous sources say that Teddy Bart's Roundtable, Nashville's long-running radio talk show whose subject orbit includes everything from religion to politics to world affairs, has been fishing among its regular guests for financial contributions to keep its nonprofit educational foundation, The Public Forum, going. The Forum's board chairman, Nashville businessman Ted Welch, recently made personal phone calls to influential guests asking them to donate, because the organization needed to make payroll.