Anonymous source tracker
Continuously updated examples of the media's use of anonymous sources
A Canadian official speaking on background said Canada also supports the "smart defence" proposal. The fact the budget cuts are coming at a time when members are embroiled in a debate over what kinds of missions the alliance should be undertaking, ...
Reuters
Because "any increase in average trade size won't benefit the high-frequency trading model, the HFT community probably does not want too much attention on the increase in odd-lot trading," said the trader, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Wall Street Journal (blog)
One analyst, speaking on condition of anonymity, notes that for the kinds of simple banknotes used even in relatively undeveloped economies, up to 20 different security mechanisms are routinely put into a typical banknote to prevent counterfeiting.
Washington Post
The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal diplomacy. Russia is a partner with the United States and European nations in containing Iran's nuclear program, although with China it has blocked the most severe penalties the United ...
BusinessWeek
Investigators are asking market participants about firms that are owned by Wall Street's largest banks and whether that presents conflicts of interest, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The Justice Department is also asking about ...
Joplin Globe
An economist with the European Union mission in Washington, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Bank of Greece would guarantee all deposits, with the backing of the European Central Bank, and nerves would calm. She denied that Europe was ...
Washington Post
Some investors ran for the exits, selling off or canceling what they had ordered, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the events. FB tumbled and hit its offering price of $38.
Times of Swaziland
However, at the time of compiling this article, a family member who did not want to be identified said the prayer had not continued. He said the family held a meeting to discuss the matter further but was reluctant to disclose what had been decided.
The Augusta Chronicle
The students and faculty were not aware of the loss during the commencement ceremony, where Dariese Roberts, 18, Kenneth Martin, 18, and one other student who did not want to be identified received their GEDs and Nicholas Hand, 19, received a college ...
The Seattle Times
The Republicans, who insisted on anonymity to discuss strategy, said Romney's team will determine, if it hasn't already, how best to recognize Bush at the party's national convention in August in Florida, where Bush's brother, Jeb, was governor.
ESPN (blog)
Montreal-based website Soccer Plus cited “sources close to negotiations” in reporting Thursday that Del Piero, a 37-year-old striker leaving Juventus after 19 years, will join LA and finish his career in the United States. The Galaxy, which does not ...
The Japan Times
Considering the time needed for companies to prepare, such as by revising plant operation schedules, a government official said the "deadline" had come for the government to decide on this summer's measures. Last year, in the early days of the ...
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."