Anonymous source tracker
Continuously updated examples of the media's use of anonymous sources
... that he will retire "came out of the blue," said one official, who agreed to speak about internal deliberations only on the condition of anonymity. ...
Washington Post
He sized up Adrian early, took advantage of Adrian's failings and used them against him," said a council member who spoke on the condition of anonymity ...
Wall Street Journal
... and we haven't received any notice from the regulator to look into rubber trading," the official, who declined to be named, told Dow Jones Newswires by ...
Wall Street Journal
The official, who declined to be named, didn't say why China was likely to tax residential property in this manner rather than through a new type of tax, ...
Bloomberg
Vale will use proceeds of the sale for general corporate purposes, a company press official who declined to be named said yesterday. ...
BusinessWeek
The government has central bank approval to sell up to $1 billion of 10-year peso notes to international investors, a government official said on Sept. 2. ...
Utica Observer Dispatch
It was one of the youths she worked with, who did not wish to be identified, who wrote the poem about his struggles. It was a life-changing experience after ...
NEXT
... due to his inability to quell the alarming rate of kidnappings in the country, a source in the police who asked not to be named, told NEXT yesterday. ...
Sydney Morning Herald
Another neighbour, who also asked not to be named, said she was in the shower when she heard some screams. But she said she was not worried as "this happens ...
The Bridgeton News - NJ.com
... my wife and my 5-year-old daughter," said the husband of the family, originally from Millville, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. ...
Boston Herald
“There were hundreds of bees all over the place,” said the sister, who asked to remain anonymous. “They were all over her body. ...
The Detroit News
The company plans to start courting investors in early November, after the midterm congressional elections, a source briefed on the matter has told The ...
About the tracker
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."
| BusinessWeek | 3,099 |
| Wall Street Journal | 2,786 |
| Reuters | 2,124 |
| The Associated Press | 1,233 |
| New York Times | 969 |
| Washington Post | 757 |
| Bloomberg | 756 |
| New York Daily News | 449 |
| AFP | 414 |
| Financial Times | 377 |
| Los Angeles Times | 365 |
| New York Times (blog) | 340 |
| Economic Times | 331 |
| Livemint | 329 |
| ESPN | 308 |
| New York Post | 302 |
| San Francisco Chronicle | 242 |
| Boston Globe | 226 |
| Hindustan Times | 208 |
| CNN | 192 |
| ABC News | 174 |
| Philadelphia Inquirer | 172 |
| San Jose Mercury News | 171 |
| Washington Post (blog) | 165 |
| FOXNews | 160 |
| The Star-Ledger - NJ.com | 156 |
| Times of India | 152 |
| Wall Street Journal (blog) | 145 |
| Los Angeles Times (blog) | 143 |
| MiamiHerald.com | 130 |
| Chicago Sun-Times | 129 |
| Sydney Morning Herald | 129 |
| Business Standard | 127 |
| Chicago Tribune | 122 |
| The Guardian | 120 |
| Reuters India | 118 |
| MarketWatch | 117 |
| Reuters Africa | 115 |
| Boston Herald | 114 |
| Daily Mail | 114 |
| Examiner.com | 112 |
| UPI.com | 110 |
| Detroit Free Press | 109 |
| Globe and Mail | 107 |
| msnbc.com | 106 |
| Seattle Times | 105 |
| Xinhua | 105 |
| CNN International | 102 |
| Sify | 101 |
| Telegraph.co.uk | 100 |

