Anonymous source tracker
Continuously updated examples of the media's use of anonymous sources
The company has hired Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. and Westpac Banking Corp. to help arrange a A$250 million loan to refinance debt, according to a person familiar with the matter. To contact the reporter on this story: Sarah Jones in ...
Fox News
They spoke on condition of anonymity because lawmakers have not finalized all the details. Those are the most contentious parts of legislation designed to boost cybersecurity against the constant attacks that target US government, corporate and ...
Independent Online
But a regional leader, who asked not to be named, said Malema would find it difficult to influence PEC decisions if expelled. “Once you are out, you can only influence an individual and not the structure.” Sources said Malema's options outside of ANC ...
Washington Post
“The regime will be toppled, and the people will live freely and democratically,” said one of a group of men who asked not to be named because he feared for his safety, speaking in his home in a middle-class residential area of Daraa.
WESH Orlando
Neighbors who did not want to be identified said their hearts ache for the family. "I stayed in one spot probably for 45 minutes, just praying at that time, and I saw the paramedics going to work on him," a neighbor said. "It's really shocking.
Bloomberg
The Securities and Exchange Commission will appoint Franzel to replace former acting chairman Daniel Goelzer, whose term on the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board expired late last year, said the people, who declined to be identified because the ...
Pensions & Investments
“It (is) a three-dimensional chess game ... and (Mr. Gotbaum) knows how to play,” said one bankruptcy expert, who declined to be identified. The risk of assuming a $9 billion unfunded liability from American offers plenty of motivation for officials at ...
India Today
However, one top franchise official told Mail Today on the condition of anonymity that there was still hope that Roy's anger would subside and some sort of deal could be struck between Sahara and the BCCI. "If you listened to his press conference, ...
The Zimbabwe Standard
The sources said Tsvangirai, who failed to attend last week's Cabinet meeting, had asked Mugabe not to allow Police Commissioner-General Augustine Chihuri to attend the meeting as his term of office expired last month. Mugabe insisted that Chihuri ...
KPRC Houston
"The fact that somebody has been in my house, uninvited, is scary and frustrating," said another victim who asked not to be identified. "You lose sleep, every night you think somebody's going to be out there," said David Rabe, who said thieves twice ...
Pensions & Investments
s hedge funds last year were less than in 2010, which in turn were less than 2009 redemptions, said a source with knowledge of the company, who asked not to be identified. The company's assets totaled $28 billion as of Dec.
Bloomberg
... Porter LLP in Washington, is being vetted by the White House to become the new antitrust chief when Pozen departs April 30, according to two people familiar with the process who asked not to be identified because of its confidential nature.
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 | 8,141 |
| Reuters | 6,916 |
| BusinessWeek | 6,335 |
| Bloomberg | 5,684 |
| New York Times | 2,944 |
| Washington Post | 2,641 |
| The Associated Press | 2,061 |
| Los Angeles Times | 1,502 |
| San Francisco Chronicle | 1,408 |
| New York Daily News | 1,218 |
| New York Post | 1,199 |
| AFP | 1,133 |
| Livemint | 1,111 |
| Economic Times | 1,099 |
| Times of India | 1,059 |
| Financial Times | 1,030 |
| ESPN | 1,024 |
| Hindustan Times | 888 |
| Reuters Africa | 855 |
| 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 | 547 |
| Daily Mail | 526 |
| Chicago Tribune | 519 |
| San Jose Mercury News | 518 |
| Washington Post (blog) | 516 |
| CNN | 492 |
| Business Standard | 479 |
| Sydney Morning Herald | 470 |
| Philadelphia Inquirer | 453 |
| msnbc.com | 431 |
| ABC News | 414 |
| The News International | 411 |
| The Guardian | 409 |
| MiamiHerald.com | 379 |
| Monsters and Critics.com | 375 |
| UPI.com | 367 |
| Inquirer.net | 363 |
| Daily News & Analysis | 362 |
| NASDAQ | 361 |
| Detroit Free Press | 355 |
| Xinhua | 346 |
| Fox News | 343 |
| Sify | 343 |
| Salon | 328 |
| Reuters India | 326 |