Heather Brooke is wrong on anonymous sources

Heather Brooke, the journalist and freedom of information campaigner, spoke on Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe last night, about journalists using anonymous sources for information.

She bemoaned the faceless sources and made this sweeping statement:

There’s only really one reason to remain anonymous and that is to avoid accountability for what they say. If they were confident about what they were saying then they would put their name behind it, end of story.

Well…that may be true for some people. But what about those who are trying to protect their jobs? Margaret Haywood was a nurse who went undercover for Panorama and exposed the neglect of elderly patients in a Sussex hospital. She wasn’t anonymous and put her name to the exposé – and was subsequently being struck off the nursing register. If whistleblowers aren’t anonymous they put their jobs, and very possibly their safety, at risk. It has nothing to do with accountability.

I’m sure there are some cases where the anonymous source is trying to manipulate the journalist. Brooke says:

Because they know that their name isn’t going to be linked with that statement, sometimes there’s a temptation to bend the truth, to misrepresent the truth and sometimes to outright lie…What they are providing is information control, not information sharing.

To an extent, Brooke’s right. Some of these sources will try to trick the journalist, but this is where it’s important that a journo uses his/her instinct. Do they trust the source? Does the story sound likely? Have they challenged the source to prove or justify what they’re saying?

The last thing a journalist wants to do is burn their source, particularly if it’s a good one. So why not protect them from a backlash? We can’t trust on-the-record statements from officials to offer the truth, so we rely on off-the-record briefings from our sources to get underneath the bullshit.

Only using sources willing to go on-the-record would mean a lot of information would never make it into the public domain. It’d be like cutting a life-line. It’s already hard enough to get past the public face of those in power, without then closing a useful way through.

It’s down to the journalist’s competence and ethics on scrutinising the source’s reliability, and whether to use the gathered info in a report. Only using named sources is not the answer to the problem.