Anonymous sources:"hurt the reputation of journalism"

Anonymous sources:‘hurt the reputation of journalism,’ some say.
Julia Brown, Columnist • February 26, 2013

“In my experience with common, normal, journalism publications, any that I have worked for, have a written or even unwritten rule that you didn’t use unnamed sources unless you had a compelling reason. Even then, the publisher and editor had to agree, know who the source was, and why it wasn’t being named,” Michael Cavanagh, assistant professor of communication at UIS, explained.

Today, however, magazines like US, In Touch, and Star use unnamed sources with reckless abandon. “Smut” magazines, as my friends and I call them, publish stories without an interviewee’s name more often than they actually cite their source.
An inside source, a close friend, a family insider or, my personal favorite, “a witness” supposedly revealed shocking information about some celebrity that these publications just had to publish but they didn’t want to endanger their source of wrath of these big, bad celebrities.
This overuse of anonymous sources is creating distrust among the masses, in my opinion. People used to look to mass media for reliable, trustworthy news. But nowadays, most news, especially that of the celebrity variety, has to be taken with a grain of salt.
“It does, in general, hurt the reputation of journalism,” Cavanagh said. “The average consumer doesn’t distinguish between celebrity journalism and real journalism.”

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