Alaska Politics Blog : Anonymous sources

Anonymous sources

Posted by Alaska_Politics

Anchorage Daily News

Posted: September 20, 2007 - 6:55 pm

Here's a note from Daily News editors:

The Associated Press put out a story this afternoon reporting that former Veco Chairman Bill Allen agreed to assist the FBI by secretly recording telephone calls with Sen. Ted Stevens. If true, this represents a major new development in the corruption investigation, signaling that the FBI was so interested in Stevens that it attempted to ensnare him in a sting. The AP report didn’t say whether Stevens incriminated himself in any of the calls.

The AP story relied on two unnamed sources, with no confirmation from any named individual. As such, the story will not be published by the Anchorage Daily News, either in our print edition, or as a regular story on adn.com. (The story did appear at adn.com in a part of the site where AP stories automatically are posted.)

We are drawing attention to that story here because we don’t think readers of the Daily News should be the only ones in the country to not know about it — it is being published on Web sites and in newspapers everywhere. However, we also have no intent to let competitive pressures sway what we believe to be is our very sound sources policy, because in the long view that we take, we believe a newspaper’s credibility with its readers is its most valuable asset. We hope we are being transparent in alerting our readers to the story, yet explaining why we are not attaching our own credibility to it.

The Daily News’ policy on sources isn’t completely rigid. We have on rare occasions used unnamed sources in our stories and in wire stories that we’ve republished. In balancing whether to publish or not, we take several factors into consideration:

- Do we ourselves know the identities of the sources, even if we cannot publish their names, and do we know them to be credible?

- Would the sources be put in serious personal jeopardy if they were named?

- Would the information otherwise never be revealed, and is it important from a public policy standpoint?

We have no way to evaluate the truth of the AP story because we don’t know the sources and we haven’t gotten independent confirmation ourselves. If the facts are true, they are likely to come out in due time.

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