Just Don't Quote Me

By Thomas Griffith

Newswatch Thomas Griffith

Washington is full of names that make news and of news that is made anonymously by the very same people. This arrangement, convenient to all sides, can also be worrisome. Much of the punditry of Washington columnists and the daily run of informed content in newspapers, newsmagazines and on the air is based on anonymity. A Deep Throat may happen along only once in a decade, but in Washington a lot of shallow throats and wagging tongues are in action all the time.

Insiders get good at deciding who could have said what, particularly when anonymity operates by understood code names: a "senior State Department official aboard the Secretary's plane" used to mean Henry Kissinger, and now means Cyrus Vance. A diplomat or bureaucrat can privately get across his side of an argument, or an explanation of policy, while publicly stating his position in Saran Wrapped platitudes. Not wanting to be used, reporters constantly labor to get off-the-record statements put back on the record but must often settle for not-for-at-tribution ("You can use it, but don't pin it on me"). When mutual trust has been established--the one convinced he will not be misquoted, the other that he will not be misled--a lot of important information has become public.

The temptations to cheat with anonymous quotes are many, however, and skeptical readers invariably give them less weight. In the wrong reporter's hands, the use of anonymous quotes can be a lazy device, enabling him to imply that he has talked to a higher authority than he really has. At worst, without putting his own good name at risk, an official may be floating a trial balloon, scoring off a rival or planting wrong information. The bargain may seem an evenhanded one--my increased candor in exchange for your protecting my identity--but it isn't. A strange transference takes place: the responsibility for the authenticity of what is said shifts from the speaker to the person who prints and guarantees it. Editors can't live without the unnamed authority but aren't happy about depending on him.

The anonymous-quote disease is spreading to business reporting, where inside information is bound to be profitable to somebody. So when reporters are blocked by what they think to be a company's official evasions, they often seek the real dope from securities analysts and other market watchers, who follow an industry's doings with sharpened curiosity and considerable knowledge. But the danger and the injustice of using anonymous sources is well illustrated by a New York Times story of Nov. 14. about the appointment of John J. Nevin as the new president of Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. Earlier he had headed Zenith Radio Corp., the country's largest manufacturer of color television sets.

The choice of Nevin, the Times reported, "surprised many business analysts," though none are named. "They said he resigned last month as Zenith's chairman and chief executive officer under somewhat cloudy circumstances." Meaning what? "Observers of Zenith" (these same "many" unnamed analysts, presumably) "said Mr. Nevin had probably been asked to step down because the programs he introduced did not lead to the earnings gains many people had hoped for. Zenith, however, said that his decision to leave had been entirely his own." To make plain where the reporter's suspicions really lie, the Times caps the argument with this curious sentence: " 'Mr. Nevin's record is not unblemished,' commented one Wall Street analyst."

What on earth does this sentence in a news story mean? Has Nevin been guilty of some other funny business that has not yet come to light, or has he simply not done well enough, or what? A flabby and unspecific accusation is anonymously made. There it lies on a page of the New York Times--unfair, unchallengeable, unproven.

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