A big part of New York Times reporter Judith Miller's discrediting, in the minds of Boston-based media lawyers Rob Bertsche and Sheldon Toplitt, was her apparent willingness to fudge the truth to get the scoop. Bertsche says he was particularly troubled by the fact that Miller "had, at least preliminarily, agreed to identify Libby as, what was it? 'A former Congressional staffer.'" (Not only was Libby a current and not former staffer; he was also a White House and not Congressional staffer.)
"That," Bertsche says, "raised a lot of eyebrows."
Including Toplitt's. "Miller was played like a flute by the Bush administration," he says. "She was used as a tool. What's troubling? Her willingness to lie. You grant confidentiality to get information out to the public. But Libby says, 'Say I'm a former Capitol Hill staffer,' and she says OK!"
Toplitt's disgust is palpable - and justifiably so. Technically, identifying Libby as "a former Congressional staffer" was not a lie, since prior to becoming a senior administration official, Libby had worked on Capitol Hill. But had Miller's story gone to print (which it didn't), her agreement to identify Libby as "a former Congressional staffer" rather than "a senior administration official" would have mislead readers into thinking that Miller's source was not connected to the White House or the administration (which he was).
It's exactly that type of misleading identification that newly-implemented guidelines on anonymous sourcing are intended to prevent.
On March 7, 2004, the Washington Post ran Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr.'s "The Guidelines We Use to Report the News," a thoughtful and fairly thorough introduction to and explanation of the Post's newly updated reporting policy. "A succession of well-publicized missteps by the news media in recent years-from misrepresentation of facts and questionable reporting methods to outright fabrication and plagiarism-has understandably shaken public trust in the media," Downie's piece began. "The Washington Post, like several other large news organizations, has responded by reviewing our policies on accuracy, fairness and our relationships with news sources" - including anonymous ones. In fact, almost half of Downie's piece - 824 words out of 1,448 - dealt with anonymous sourcing, a practice that he paints as something of a necessary evil.
"Like our readers, we would like all sources of information in this newspaper to be named," Downie writes. "We are restating this preference in our new policy statement, and we are reminding our reporters to try to put government officials and other sources of information 'on the record' by name whenever possible, even if it means objecting to traditional Washington practices such as 'background briefings'... the culture of anonymity in dealings with the news media has proliferated. Promises of confidentiality reduce risks for sources, but they also deprive readers of important information."
But Downie also asserts that completely cutting out the use of anonymous sources would compromise the Post's responsibility to "give readers an accurate and thorough account of what is going on in the world," adding that "we recognize, as we believe our readers do, that some sources who have significant information - often information needed to hold powerful people and institutions accountable for their actions - would be risking their jobs or even their safety if they were identified. We cannot always expect named sources to contradict the official line or policy of the officials, agencies or companies for which they work." (Unsurprisingly, Downie points to the case of Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as an example of anonymous sourcing's necessity.)
One gets the sense that, from Downie's perspective, fully banishing the use of anonymous sources would be as detrimental as fully supporting their indiscriminate use.
Finding a middle ground, Downie ultimately asserts that the Post's "reporters and editors working together must weigh the costs and benefits to differentiate between those sources who truly need anonymity and those who are using it as a cover for their agendas." Additionally, per the Post's updated policy, reporters will "try to explain to readers why a source is not being named [and] will strive to tell our readers as much as we can about why such a source would be knowledgeable and whether the source has a particular point of view - for example, 'a police official involved in the investigation,' 'an aide to a Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee' or 'a senior Pentagon official who disagrees with the administration's policy.' We want at least one Post editor to know the identity of each unnamed source cited in the newspaper, as was the case during Watergate, so that editors can help decide whether to use the source in a story."
The New York Times' reporting guidelines, which were updated the month before the Post's, are cut from a similar cloth: "The use of unidentified sources is reserved for situations in which the newspaper could not otherwise print information it considers reliable and newsworthy," the guidelines read. "When we use such sources, we accept an obligation not only to convince a reader of their reliability but also to convey what we can learn of their motivation - as much as we can supply to let a reader know whether the sources have a clear point of view on the issue under discussion." (In retrospect, another segment of the Times' guidelines seems highly applicable to Miller's conversations with Libby and Novak's with his source: "We do not grant anonymity to people who use it as cover for a personal or partisan attack.")
The guidelines also outline the procedure by which reporters should vet their anonymous sources with their editors, as well as the paper's policy on the need for multiple anonymous sources ("When we grant anonymity, we do not necessarily require multiple sources. A cabinet official, for example, or the White House adviser on national security, may require anonymity while conveying a policy decision that is clearly "authorized," necessitating no corroborating source.
But when we grant anonymity for less verifiable assertions, especially if they form a disputed account, or are potentially damaging to one side in a court case, for example, corroborating sources are often necessary. The reporter should confer with the department head or senior deputy to agree upon the need and the number.")
Such guidelines are clearly well-intentioned, and their implementation is cited by many of the journalists with whom I speak as one of the few positive aftereffects of the Miller debacle. But some of those same journalists readily admit that, even in the wake of crackdowns on sourcing, such guidelines are more impressive in theory than in practice.
"These new guidelines make a big splash in journalism newsletters and papers," I say to Boston Phoenix media writer Mark Jurkowitz, who previously served as the Boston Globe's first full-time media critic. "But how big an impact do they have on the actual publications? Are they posted on the wall of the newsroom?"
His reply is immediate and somewhat unsettling: "No, they're not," he says. "The truth is, every newsroom has guidelines, standards, and practices, and frankly, in many cases, when some sort of anonymous sourcing problem happens, the editor will say, 'Of course, everyone in the newsroom is familiar with our standards and policies!' when it's something people haven't read in 15 years."
When I ask New York Times Magazine writer Matt Bai to what extent Times reporters have taken the revised guidelines to heart, his response is parallel to Jurkowitz's. Though he first makes it clear that writing for the Times magazine is different than writing for the Times newspaper, Bai tells me, "No one even sent me those guidelines. I mean, we abide by all those same rules at the magazine, but frankly, no one sent them to me."
That's fine in Bai's case: It's clear from his writing, as well as from speaking with him, that his internal code of ethics is as stringent as any official one. But not every reporter holds him or herself to such a high standard - just look at Jayson Blair. So it's a good thing for both the press and the public that the same anonymous sourcing ethos communicated in a publication's set of official guidelines can be instilled in reporters through different means.
In fact, according to Jurkowitz, the best way to effectively improve a publication's anonymous sourcing is not by distributing guidelines, but "by making sure that editors stop reporters from over-relying on anonymous sources until it becomes engrained in the reporters themselves."
While Jurkowitz was at the Globe, the paper "tightened up their rules on how to describe anonymous sources and made an effort to use terminology that, though it doesn't include the source's name, at least conveys what the source's motivation might be." And though the Globe's reporters may not have internalized its revised sourcing policies, according to Jurkowitz, its editors did. "The editors are aware of it, so when you write a story and it says, 'So-and-so is a bum,' according to a source, your editor stops you and says, 'You can't do this - who's your source?'" he says.
Jurkowitz adds that, in his own experience, rather than being too leniently enforced, papers' guidelines may be too strongly enforced. "On numerous occasions at the Globe, I've had sourcing either completely removed or modified - that happened pretty frequently," he recalls. "So [the crackdown on anonymous sourcing], in my experience, has been taken seriously - perhaps too seriously."
Newsweek Chief Political Correspondent Howard Fineman's recent Newsweek experience has reinforced for him the fact that anonymous sourcing should be taken seriously. "We had our own situation with Mike Isikoff, where we had one very, very strong source, for the Koran desecration story, but we didn't have two," he says.
The "Quaran desecration story" Fineman mentions appeared in a May 2005 issue of Newsweek. It stated that U.S. soldiers had flushed a copy of the Quaran down the toilet. The report sparked anger and violence in the Muslim world and inflamed already-strong anti-American sentiment, and in its wake, Newsweek Editor-in-Chief Richard Smith wrote a letter to readers saying, "We will raise the standards for the use of anonymous sources throughout the magazine."
Smith wrote that though "historically, unnamed sources have helped to break or advance stories of great national importance ... overuse can lead to distrust among readers and carelessness among journalists," and said that "from now on, only the editor or the managing editor, or other top editors they specifically appoint, will have the authority to sign off on the use of an anonymous source." He also said that "we will step up our commitment to help the reader understand the nature of a confidential source's access to information and his or her reasons for demanding anonymity" and that "the cryptic phrase 'sources said' will never again be the sole attribution for a story in Newsweek."
"It seems that suddenly, after the Miller fiasco, the major news organizations suddenly went back to the textbook model of two sources on everything, nothing that's not for attribution unless absolutely necessary, no anonymous sources, all this other stuff," Fineman says. "You've got to get multiple sources if you can, but I think to some extent, these resulted in some rather comical locutions in the magazine and elsewhere. They put in these ridiculous explanations: 'So-and-so, who spoke anonymously because of the fact that negotiations were ongoing,' or 'So-and-so, who declined to give their name because they might get in trouble with the bureaucracy.' They give all these explanations that don't really explain anything! Have you noticed that?"
Yes, I tell him, I have.
"They're ridiculous!" he laughs. "They don't say anything!"
Indeed, there's a certain level of ridiculousness - even silliness - accompanying many reporters' descriptions of their anonymous sources, as well as their classifications of the conditions upon which they spoke with those sources. (In an apparent nod to "Animal House," Matt Cooper famously wrote that his conversations with Karl Rove were conducted on "double-super-secret-background.")
Bertsche agrees with Fineman that the descriptions that result from newspapers' crackdowns on anonymous sourcing can
"lead to some awkward writing sometimes 'according to a former Hill staffer who would not give his name because he feared retribution,' or something like that."
But the tradeoff, in his opinion, is worth it. "It both gives the readers more information and more credibility to the story, and also, frankly, dissuades reporters from easily turning to confidential sources," he says.
Ultimately, though, guidelines externally governing reporters' use of anonymous sources, as well as the way those sources are identified in print, are at best an after-the-fact band-aid if each of a publication's individual players don't have their own internalized guidelines - especially in Washington, where the relationships between reporters and sources are habitually hazy.
"Washington is an interesting place," says the Wall Street Journal's Anne Marie Squeo, who has covered the Fitzgerald investigation. "It's probably the same thing in L.A., with the Hollywood media and the people that they write about, or in New York, covering Wall Street. Any microcosm where you have reporters covering small segments of society intensely is going to breed familiarity."
That familiarity, Squeo says, is not necessarily a bad thing. "When you're talking about sourcing, the most critical element in any strong sourcing relationship is a relationship!" she says. "You can't call up somebody you don't know and expect them to dish the sensitive information that you want. There has to be some two-way bond that has been made over time. If you're a good beat reporter, you have to have those bonds with a lot of people. That just requires honesty, really."
Squeo's newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, has won wide praise for its responsible use of anonymous sources. "We tend to not like just having one source - two or three is preferable. That tends to bolster the credibility of the story," she says.
But as Bai points out, "the truth, of course, is that there's no formula."
"Sometimes," he tells me, "we get into discussions about what makes information printable-does it have a second source? Do you have a named source? But it's not like three unnamed sources equals one named source, or, you know, two shaky sources equals one great source! It really relies on the reporter's judgment and the editor's judgment and the credibility of the people you talk to."
"The thing I always focus on in terms of sourcing is, there is a reason why every single person is telling you the information they're telling you," Squeo says. "You have to be very cognizant of why a person is telling you something, and you almost need to go out of your way then to approach a person on the opposite side who will tell you the same thing, because you don't want to get spun by someone who's using you as a tool to get their message across.
"That seems to have been the case with the Judy Miller WMD stuff," she continues. "That happened to her with those stories: she was getting a lot of information from one side of the equation, and it ended up providing a warped picture of what was going on."
According to Squeo, publications that didn't make mention of that "warped picture" in their coverage of Miller's Plamegate role were doing a disservice to the public.
"You couldn't write a story about her without mentioning the WMD stuff," Squeo says. "You wouldn't be giving an accurate description of her to the reader, were you to eliminate those details about her."
But those details were conspicuously absent from much of the mainstream media's news coverage of Miller during her jail stay. Of all the non-column, non-editorial Miller coverage that appeared between July 6 and September 29, 2005 in Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, the National Review, the New York Observer, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post, an astonishingly low 8.9 percent of articles mentioned Miller's overly credulous WMD reporting. Only 1.3 percent - a single article - specifically pointed out the fact that an anonymous source supplied the misinformation Miller conveyed. (By contrast, 35.4 percent of articles mentioned the fact that Miller never actually used the information she gathered from Libby to write a story about Plame.)
There's no doubt in my mind that this lack of context contributed to Miller's canonization as a First Amendment martyr. Bertsche says it best: "Judy Miller went from rogue to hero to rogue again." Just as her initial "rogue-to-hero" transformation was aided and abetted by a press that seemed to have short-term memory loss, Miller's transformation from "hero-to-rogue" was facilitated by that same press's turnaround. All of a sudden, journalists could purge their own journalistic sins by decrying Miller's, and she went from martyr to scapegoat.
I share my impression - that right after Miller was released from jail, the press turned on her - with Slate.com's Jack Shafer.
"You might have something there," he says thoughtfully. "But I think that rather than turning on her, maybe the journalists and organizations that had given her the benefit of the doubt had a clearer view - or thought that they had a clearer view - of what her character was."
"You know," he continues, "if you're a pleasant guest at my house 15 times in a row but then, on the sixteenth time, you puke all over my nice linens, if I take umbrage at that, we can't say that I'm 'turning on' you. We can say that in the presence of new information, I have a new assessment of you. I think that's probably more of what happened, but that's just my subjective view."
The "new information," in Miller's case, included the revelation that Libby had cleared her to testify before she went to jail, as well as the fact that, as Howell writes, "she was willing to offer an anonymous source, Scooter Libby, a disingenuous label of 'former Hill staffer.'"
But that "new information" didn't just unleash a tide of coverage questioning Miller's credibility. It also seemed to make reporters feel that every aspect of Miller's character -including her gender - was fair game.
"There was a New York Magazine article about her about her supposedly sleeping with her sources and being bitchy and aggressive and hard to work with that has a tinge - more than a tinge, frankly - of sexism," Jurkowitz says. (That New York Magazine story appeared in late October of 2005.)
"Within the journalism community," he adds, "there was talk that she was an aggressive woman, that she was pushy, that she slept around with her sources, blah, blah, blah - all things that men would not be criticized for."
When I ask Fineman whether he has detected any gender currents in media coverage of Miller, his response is along the same lines.
"You would think that gender really wouldn't matter any more - you would think," Fineman says. "But it does. And I think Judy, who is very charming, and who is a lovely dinner party companion... her femininity was often cattily remarked on by others in the business."
"She's a product of the sixties," Fineman says. "I think that she at one point had a long-lasting love affair with the late Les Aspin from Wisconsin, a very influential member of Congress... you know, Judy was a character, a female character. People from time to time accused her of getting scoops because she was a woman; they said she was flirting too much with various world leaders, including Momar Quadafi. I'm not the world's greatest feminist, but I think it's a little bit insulting, and I think that she was aware of it and lived with it.
"You know," he continues, "people can be catty, and people in journalism are very resentful and jealous and competitive. They will look for reasons to denigrate somebody else's scoop. In her case, they used her femininity."
"There was probably some element of sexism in the huffs from her mostly anonymous colleagues about her 'sharp elbows' and territorial nature," Swidey writes. "But we've all worked with colleagues like that from time to time. While they don't make for good colleagues, neither sex has a hold on these negative characteristics."
Shafer concurs. "I wrote one defense of her when she was pushing the MET Alpha officers around," he says. "Well, you know, reporters do sometimes have to threaten sources, and I don't mind it when a journalist gets pushy or shovy. I wouldn't ascribe that to gender. I think male reporters get pushy and bossy and are prima donnas, too."
But Squeo has a different take. "I don't think so," she says when I ask her if Miller was treated differently in the press because of her gender. "I think that this would be a bad situation to try to draw that conclusion from. That's not to say that wouldn't necessarily be true if it were another woman reporter, but Judy Miller was a very well-known reporter with a very established brand name - she wasn't going to get treated like any other reporter anyway because of the very high-profile role she had played at the New York Times for so many years."
"I recall her being all over television post-September 11, when her book about biological weapons had first come out," Squeo continues. "She's a celebrity journalist, and I think that the type of media scrutiny she received was that which would be given to any celebrity journalist."
I ask Squeo if she thinks anything positive has come out of the Miller saga, and her response is an emphatic no.
"When this case goes to trial, the media is going to end up looking way worse than Scooter Libby ever could," Squeo says. "Because every one of the ad hoc, seat-of-the-pants tactics that are endemic to this industry and have been for decades and decades are going to be on trial. Off-the-record conversations, on-the-record conversations, what does that mean? All of these things are going to be held under a microscope."
But according to Fineman, holding journalistic practices under a microscope might not be such a bad thing. When I first ask him whether Miller's high-profile case has had any positive results, he immediately says no. But after a slight pause, he reconsiders.
"Yes, yes," he says. "And the yes is, you realize, when you see car crashes like this, that you've got to do a better job! And I think the car crash in the end wasn't just Judy Miller; it was the fact that we were not skeptical enough leading up to the war, for a host of reasons.
"Now you don't want to do what always happens in media and in life, which is to overcorrect and always fight the last war and follow up one bad call with another," he continues. "My late father always used to say, 'The worst kind of umpire is one who evens up.' So we should be skeptical, but that doesn't mean we should disbelieve everything, just on general principle."
It's Jurkowitz's hope that Miller's saga has "educated the public a little bit about things like confidential sources and the ethical decisions that journalists make.
"Any time that we can engage the public and make them pay attention to what our ethical issues are and the principles we hold dear, there's some inherent value in that," he says.
But not enough inherent value to undo the damage done. "It's a Pyrrhic victory in this case, I think," Jurkowitz says. "There are no heroes here. There's very little to take out of this episode that makes me feel good about journalism."
