Anonymous source tracker
Continuously updated examples of the media's use of anonymous sources
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 ...
OCRegister
A person who asked to remain anonymous holds and smells new items given to her by volunteers during a community outreach co-hosted by Vineyard Church of Anaheim, The Orange County Rescue Mission and the Homicide Task Force. The two-hour program helped ...
Reuters
... political leaders to back the reforms, as well as the debt swap and any other initiative -- including any taken by public creditors like the ECB -- that would bring Greece's debt down to the targeted 120 pct of GDP level by 2020, the source said.
Times LIVE
Last year they took to task the state-owned Zimpapers, asking why it was distributing a paper criticising the president," a government official said. "With the elections coming, Zanu-PF is unhappy with private newspapers' coverage and wants to go back ...
Detroit Free Press
She declined to give her name. “Everyone here is just devastated,” she said. The center coaches 300 to 400 youths, most of them girls, from pre-school through high school, she said. LeFevere was being held in the Oakland County Jail on a $250000 cash ...
Chicago Sun-Times
Wild, a punter on North Central's 2010 football team, tried to stop the attack and was fatally stabbed in the upper abdomen by a weapon that may have pierced his heart, a source said. Hayes remains hospitalized in fair condition and is expected to ...
Newsday
He asked not to be named because the talks are ongoing. Debt inspectors representing eurozone countries and the International Monetary Fund are pushing for tougher austerity measures and private sector pay cuts before approving a new €130 billion ...
Montreal Gazette
“Calgary's homeless, as I see it, in the past 10 years got way too visible,” said another Alpha Hotel resident (who asked not to be named), citing a March 2010 talk by Sam Tsemberis, hosted by the Calgary Homeless Foundation. Tsemberis is founder and ...
Reuters
About 3500 people had crossed westwards into Mauritania, said a Mauritanian official, who asked not to be named. The International Committee for the Red Cross said on Friday that nearly 10000 people had fled into Niger after fighting between the army ...
Nigerian Tribune
On his own, a lecturer at the Institute of Conflict Resolution in the University of Ibadan, who declined to give his name, stated that the problem starts and ends with the police. “The police have shown that they are largely incapable of fighting crime ...
Bleacher Report
The police were watching carefully during the melee created by Money May and 50, and one officer said, ”If he throws the money, then we would have to do something about it,” said a police officer, who declined to be named. “It could create a riot.
The Borneo Post
The neighbour, who declined to be named, said she had gone to the house to check on him. “As he did not respond when I knocked several times on the door around 4.30pm, I suspected something amiss and decided to enter to check.
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 |