Anonymous source tracker
Continuously updated examples of the media's use of anonymous sources
By IANS, Lucknow : The run-up to assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh has set the illegal betting market abuzz with bookies putting their money on a hung house, sources close to the bookmakers said Sunday. Stakes were high on the possible successor to ...
Arirang News
According to an anonymous source on Sunday, North Korea acquired several MQM-107 Streakers, a target-towing drone used by the US Army and Air Force most likely through Syria. The source said North Korea has been attempting to build its own drone by ...
ABS CBN News
ABS-CBNnews.com sources said the issue was first tackled last Tuesday, and a decision could be made at the full court meeting this week. Sources said the high court could not just wait for subpoenas to be issued and delve later on an issue that could ...
Reuters
said a housewife in Kermanshah, who declined to give her name. Reza Khaleghi, who owns a small grocery store in the central city of Karaj near Tehran, said gloomily: "Because of sanctions prices are increasing almost every day.
Wall Street Journal
Mr. Yamaguchi "poured gasoline into the fire," a government official said Friday, adding, "political frustrations with the BOJ have been growing." As Japan's export-led economic rebound loses steam owing to flagging overseas demand and export-damaging ...
Bloomberg
3, La Vanguardia said, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter. The Bank of Spain's head of regulation, Jose Maria Roldan, and the central bank's head of financial stability, Daniel Perez, met banking representatives to explain the ...
Ocala
The activists spoke on condition of anonymity to protect themselves from retaliation. On Saturday, thousands protested across Syria in solidarity with the beleaguered city. "Homs, your blood will not go in vain," read a banner held by a protester a ...
Sydney Morning Herald
One analyst, speaking off the record last Friday, said should the proposed $5.1 billion merger go ahead, Whitehaven and Aston would be a ''good fit'' with Xstrata's Australian operations as the combined vehicle would have a dominant market position in ...
People's Daily Online
04 (Xinhua) -- The leadership of Palestinian Hamas movement outside Gaza has not yet found an official foothold after the leaders had left Syria, a source said Saturday. The Islamic movement has formally and informally asked several Arab countries to ...
Ahram Online
(Photo:Reuters) Pakistan will support every effort to promote reconciliation in Afghanistan, a senior government official said ahead of Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani's visit to Qatar Monday to discuss peace efforts. Gilani's trip comes after the ...
The Australian
Asking not to be named, the source said: "I accept now that it might have been the wrong thing to have removed Kevin. But it would be an even bigger mistake to put him back now." The source said Right faction MPs were being told that while they might ...
WTOP
Three former Tilco Drive workers spoke to The Frederick News-Post on the condition of anonymity. The News-Post agreed to the request because of the compelling nature of the information and its widespread implications. "It seems like Baltimore is more ...
The goal of the anonymous source tracker is to make the media's use of anonymous sources more transparent. It's an experiment, and as such it's imperfect and subject to change.
While it finds many examples of the use of anonymous sources, it doesn't find all anonymous sources used by newspapers, magazines, TV stations, wire services or other news outlets online.
It gets its examples from the English version of Google News. Phrases commonly used to identify anonymous sources are fed to Google News, which produces an Atom feed for each phrase. Those feeds are then combined under a single label, "anonymous," in Google Reader. That feed is public. Every hour a PHP script grabs the Google Reader feed, extracts the summary text, highlights the anonymous source phrasing, and puts it in a database to display on the anonymous source tracker.
Some examples are rejected, even though the articles they point to used anonymous sources, because the anonymous source phrasing isn't in the summary.
Some examples are duplicates. If a URL is already in the database, those examples are rejected. But sometimes the same story can have different URLs, so the same story can appear more than once. The same wire story may also be run by multiple outlets.
The news outlets scanned are the same outlets scanned by Google News. I don't know what criteria Google News uses to decide whether to include a Web site.
Typically Google returns a search result for a phrase giving a summary for only one outlet, with an "and more" link pointing to other matches for stories on the same subject. The anonymous source tracker doesn't grab those "and more" results, so many examples are undoubtedly missed.
I don't know how Google does what it does or why, or why one outlet is given prominence for a given search while another isn't, so I don't know if all outlets are being treated equally by the anonymous source tracker.
The count for each news outlet doesn't include every anonymously sourced story produced by that outlet. The counts shouldn't be considered valid rankings.
To quote Donald Rumsfeld, "there are known unknowns."
"That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don't know we don't know."
| Wall Street Journal | 8,136 |
| Reuters | 6,911 |
| BusinessWeek | 6,329 |
| Bloomberg | 5,670 |
| New York Times | 2,940 |
| Washington Post | 2,636 |
| The Associated Press | 2,060 |
| Los Angeles Times | 1,501 |
| San Francisco Chronicle | 1,408 |
| New York Daily News | 1,218 |
| New York Post | 1,198 |
| AFP | 1,131 |
| Livemint | 1,109 |
| Economic Times | 1,097 |
| Times of India | 1,054 |
| Financial Times | 1,030 |
| ESPN | 1,023 |
| Hindustan Times | 885 |
| Reuters Africa | 854 |
| New York Times (blog) | 837 |
| Patch.com | 755 |
| Boston Globe | 664 |
| The Star-Ledger - NJ.com | 633 |
| Wall Street Journal (blog) | 590 |
| CNN International | 558 |
| Chicago Sun-Times | 545 |
| Daily Mail | 524 |
| Chicago Tribune | 519 |
| San Jose Mercury News | 516 |
| Washington Post (blog) | 516 |
| CNN | 492 |
| Business Standard | 478 |
| Sydney Morning Herald | 469 |
| Philadelphia Inquirer | 452 |
| msnbc.com | 431 |
| ABC News | 414 |
| The News International | 411 |
| The Guardian | 408 |
| MiamiHerald.com | 379 |
| Monsters and Critics.com | 375 |
| UPI.com | 367 |
| Daily News & Analysis | 362 |
| Inquirer.net | 361 |
| NASDAQ | 360 |
| Detroit Free Press | 355 |
| Xinhua | 346 |
| Sify | 343 |
| Fox News | 340 |
| Salon | 328 |
| Reuters India | 326 |