Anonymous source tracker
Continuously updated examples of the media's use of anonymous sources
A neighbor, speaking on condition of anonymity with The Register-Guard, said medical marijuana is grown there. A man who answered the phone at the residence on Saturday afternoon declined to comment. Mara Hertzberg told The Register-Guard on Thursday ...
The Associated Press
He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press. The mountainous peninsula has seen a surge in lawlessness in the last week. On Friday two Americans were briefly abducted by Bedouin tribesmen in the latest of a ...
Boston.com
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 ...
WisconsinWatch.org
“You can go there and know that people kind of understand you at least,” said a member with obsessive-compulsive disorder who asked not to be named for privacy reasons. “You get to know their struggles every day, whatever they are, and to be there to ...
Detroit Free Press
Interviews with 10 former appointees, some of whom asked not to be named for fear of retribution, indicate little has changed since Shriner's firing. They told the Free Press that the minimum cost to keep their job was $500 -- the price of a ticket to ...
Fox News
Even after working all night they would sometimes come home and go back out to help their mother clean houses during the day," said the family's landlord, who asked not to be named out of privacy concerns. "Then came the news that Eder killed them.
Zee News
She wasn't sleeping as well, didn't seem to be eating and looked really gaunt,” a source said. On Friday, Moore's youngest daughter Tallulah celebrated her 18th birthday at her father Bruce Willis's Beverly Hills home along with her sister, Rumer.
The Asian Age
I think the Election Commission has raised a valid point and this would provide a level playing field,'' a senior government official said. Senior officials in DoPT said the government had been thinking of bringing in a cooling off period even before ...
Boston.com
“I think that was the exact correct response,'' said the woman, who asked to remain anonymous for fear her child would lose opportunities in the music community if she criticized Zander. “He was a huge celebrity, he could be extremely grandiose and he ...
Zee News
There's a real spark there,” the source said. However, Deschanel is said to be “intrigued” by Brand's interest in her. “But she's heard about his reputation as a womanizer, and isn't sure whether she's ready to rush into another relationship so quickly ...
Daily News & Analysis
A source close to Mallika says that the international campaign that she was a part of was promoted heavily in various parts of India and other third world countries. “It was basically to urge people to come out and take the vaccine.
New York Times
The description of the shift to a Special Operations mission in Afghanistan by senior officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the final plans have not been approved, go a long way toward explaining what Mr. Panetta sketched out for ...
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 |