Anonymous sources are necessary

I have watched with interest over the past few weeks as the discussion over reporters' use of anonymous sources becomes more and more heated. It really started a few months back when reporters were threatened with jailtime by an overzealous prosecutor looking into a printed story that revealed the identity of a CIA operative.
That was followed by the recent revelations that Newsweek had claimed multiple anonymous sources when it only had one on a story concerning the desecration of the Koran, which turned out to be false.
Finally, last week's revelation that Mark Felt, once the second in command at the FBI, was the man referred to in Woodward and Bernstein's "All the President's Men" as "Deep Throat," likely the most famous anonymous source of all time, convinced me that it was time to write about the subject.
Anonymous sources are not just vital to journalism, they are vital to the public. Without them, many of the most important stories would never come to light. Watergate is the most prominent story which was helped by anonymous sources, but there are thousands of others.
Do these unnamed sources have agendas? Of course, they do. That's why reporters need to check on the information they receive. Woodward and Bernstein were diligent in doing so, making sure they had at least two sources to corroborate any piece of information they received. Unfortunately, not all journalists are that diligent.
I wrote a little bit about this last week when the revelations about Deep Throat were coming to light. Sometimes journalists are lazy and unscrupulous and use unnamed sources to cover up a lack of work or a lack of ethics.
During my quarter of a century as a reporter, I have used anonymous sources from time to time, always making sure to verify their information with other sources before running it.
The memories of one such time came flowing back to me today when I read about the death of Larry Stapleton, 62, a 22-year veteran of the Webb City Police Department. No, Larry Stapleton was not any kind of a source in my articles. I can't recall ever having talked to the man, but he was a key actor in one of the biggest stories of my career. I wrote most of what is going to follow on this blog back in February 2004, but considering everything that has been in the news, it bears repeating.
It has been about 15 years since I started covering the turmoil in the Webb City Police Department. Ironically, the story began in The Joplin Globe. A Carterville man named Vince McCarty was arrested on a traffic violation in Webb City and claimed he had been beaten by three Webb City police officers as they were taking him to his cell. That complaint and the city's response to it were featured in reporter Andy Ostmeyer's story in the Globe.
I had just started covering Webb City news for The Carthage Press, so I wasn't too concerned about losing out on that story, but being a competitive reporter, I wanted to get in on it somehow.
My opportunity came the next week. I was covering a Webb City Council meeting at the old city hall when the council went into a closed session to discuss a personnel situation. It was warm outside, so several of the spectators went outside to talk. I went outside to listen.
A man and a woman were talking and I heard the man say, "They say that guy got beat up pretty bad."
The woman nodded and said, "You should hear the tape."
Naturally, bells started ringing for this reporter. "Tape?" I thought. I continued listening and the woman described what she had heard on the tape. When she finished talking, I approached her and said, "I sure would like to hear that tape."
My already fragile ego was further deflated when she asked, "And who are you?"
I told her who I was and she told me she would make a copy of the tape for me and give it to me at three o'clock the next afternoon if I stopped by the convenience store she owned. I picked up the copy the next day and was shocked at what I heard. The beating had been captured on audiotape. You could hear Vince McCarty screaming as the officers beat him and used a stun gun on him and told him that this is what happens "if you mess around in Webb City." The officers involved, it turned out, were Lou Angel, John Diller, and Scott Malone. I could distinctly make out the voices of the man who was being beaten and three other people, but since I had never heard these voices before, I had no way of knowing if the tape was authentic.
I always took pride in being thorough, so I went to two sources in Webb City and had it confirmed that the voices belonged to the three officers who had been accused. Now I had to convince my publisher, Jim Farley, that we should run an article on the tape.
The problem was we still had no way of authenticating the tape, we didn't know who had recorded it, or if anything had been cut out of it. Having been told that the tape had been sent to the FBI for authentication, I called an FBI source and got the confirmation that the FBI was looking into this mysterious tape. That gave me one person who said it had been sent to the FBI, and one person on the FBI who said the tape was being investigated.
After that, Farley and my editor, Neil Campbell, gave me the go-ahead on the story. That started an interesting period in my life. I had already established a reputation as an investigative reporter while I was at the Lamar newspaper, but this one would end up putting me on the map, at least on a small scale.
When the tape story hit the streets in Webb City, we received a report that Webb City police officers were stealing the newspapers and destroying them. I wrote that story also after I had it confirmed and that stopped that, even though to this day I do not go even one mile over the speed limit when I am in Webb City.
The Webb City story continued to develop. I managed to find sources in the police department who were upset with what the police chief and a few officers were doing to the city. I found people who had been on the police department who were willing to talk and I cultivated sources on the City Council and sources who worked for the city.
I had people who gave me information, but would not reveal their names. I had sources who gladly went on the record, or who eventually went on the record, because I believed in getting as many people to talk for the record as possible.
For the next two years, I turned out story after story uncovering things that the mayor and the police chief wanted to keep hidden. I published one story detailing how the city attorney had warned the council that the police chief was illegally buying machine guns for the private use of his officers. I uncovered a city document with the help of three brave council members which outlined nearly every violation of the law that had been made by the police department. For a long time, those three women provided me with information, which was always backed by other sources. Finally, the three went on the record, only for The Carthage Press, something that never would have happened if I had not been accurate, not only with the stories that featured information from them, but other stories involving the Webb City Police Department and the Webb City Council.
Throughout this time, a Joplin Globe reporter, a female reporter who had worked for the Globe for nearly two decades, continued to deride my reporting, saying time after time that she would not be allowed to get away with "that kind of tabloid reporting" at the Globe. And despite my efforts to carefully source my stories (and I almost always had to have at least three sources before I would print anything), I began wondering when no one picked up on my stories either at the Globe or at the three local television stations.
A battle had developed between the mayor and the police chief, which ended up in the firing of seven officers, including the three who had been involved in the beating. The other four officers, including Larry Stapleton, had been fired for insubordination when they would not answer the mayor's questions during a hastily called meeting at the height of the controversy.
Those four officers filed suit against Mayor Richardson and the council and I covered the trial at the federal courts building in Joplin. By this time, nearly two years had passed since my initial Webb City story. During that trial, every controversial story I had written was confirmed in sworn testimony. The Globe reporter told me, "You were lucky," and left it at that. Nevertheless, I knew how hard I had worked and I felt vindicated.The Webb City story was the first one to land me the number one spot among daily newspapers for investigative reporting at the annual Missouri Press Association contest in 1991. I defended that title successfully for the next three years, with investigations into teen drinking, soft sentences for sex offenders in Barton County, and a hospital administrator with a long record of sexual harassment. I was fortunate in those stories that people were willing to go on the record or I had documents to back up my reporting.
Yes, there are some reporters who seem to feel there is a certain amount of glamour to using anonymous sources, but most reporters would prefer to have someone willing to speak for the record. Unfortunately, some people just won't do it, and some people are in a position where they cannot do it.
The best thing to come out of this focus on unnamed sources is that newspapers, magazines and broadcast outlets are reviewing their policies on anonymous sources, trying to cut down on their use. Surveys have shown that the media uses far less unnamed sources than they did 20 or 30 years ago.
Anonymous sources will never be eliminated, but they must never take the place of good old fashioned reporting. That was the lesson young reporters should have learned from Woodward and Bernstein and Deep Throat.