Anonymous source tracker
Continuously updated examples of the media's use of anonymous sources
Now sources close to Hamilton, 27, say he is considering getting back together with Miss Scherzinger, 33, after an extended Christmas-period training break in Colorado, where the couple are understood to have met to discuss their future. Back on track?
American Thinker
A trustee who asked to remain anonymous in an interview with the Allentown Morning Call admitted that media pressure played a role in the decision. Agricultural trustee Keith Eckels meanwhile admitted that the board rushed to judgment without ...
Pasadena Sun
The mother of a current Polytechnic kindergarten student, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid jeopardizing the admissions chances of her younger children, employed different strategies while pursuing four schools. She created a spread sheet ...
New York Daily News
A source close to Cashman called Neathway's claims baloney. “She has a long history of concocting claims relative to reproductive issues in order to harass people she's targeting,” the source said. “She's a psychotic person, and this is part of her ...
New York Post
By REBECCA HARSHBARGER A New Jersey man was arrested for allegedly stalking a stranger who worked in Midtown, police sources said. Kenneth Grochulski, 45, allegedly kept following a 24-year-old woman from her job to Grand Central Terminal, ...
New York Post
By KIRSTAN CONLEY Four teen gangbangers savagely attacked and robbed a woman after tying her to a bed during a terrifying Brooklyn home invasion, sources said today. The armed men in ski masks followed the woman's 24-year-old boyfriend to their ...
Los Angeles Times
Law enforcement sources said Saturday that detectives believe the girl whose parents complained was a victim of both Berndt and Springer. She is one of the two students whose allegations led to Springer's arrest, and detectives have been investigating ...
San Francisco Chronicle
5 Peace talks: Pakistan's prime minister, Yousuf Reza Gilani, will travel to Qatar this week to talk with leaders there about the prospect of a peace deal to end the war in Afghanistan, a government official said Saturday, a trip that suggests some ...
Detroit Free Press
She declined to give her name. The Sheriff's Office is asking people to come forward if they think LeFevre acted improperly toward other girls he coached, including those at gyms in Auburn Hills and Chesterfield Township.
Monterey County Herald
"It's not so much what the public wants, it's what they're being spoon-fed," said one insider who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "It's what the production companies, National Geographic and the Discovery Channel are demanding so they can sell ...
Houston Chronicle (blog)
Romney aides are “quietly in touch with Ron Paul,” according to a Republican adviser who is in touch with the Romney campaign and requested anonymity to discuss the campaign's internal thinking. The Paul and Romney campaigns have “coordinated” on minor ...
Arab Times Kuwait English Daily
A law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the matter is under investigation, told The Associated Press that authorities were looking at the possibility the message was intercepted from the private email account of one of ...
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 | 8,135 |
| Reuters | 6,910 |
| 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 |