Anonymous source tracker
Continuously updated examples of the media's use of anonymous sources
“When you guys were all out there writing your Herman Cain stories, we were not following you into that sideshow,” one Obama aide said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “We are keeping our eyes on the prize.” Recently, that prize has been giving ...
New York Times
The Human Rights Campaign approached Mr. Blankfein in November through a gay executive at Goldman, and he was immediately receptive to the idea, according to people briefed on the matter but not authorized to speak publicly.
Jerusalem Post
By GIL HOFFMAN 02/06/2012 03:37 MKs, who asked not to be identified, said they were surprised by how many threats they had received since they endorsed Livni. By REUTERS Key Kadima activists who support Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee ...
The Bridgeton News - NJ.com
Those owners and others contacted for this story requested anonymity, but share many of the same problems associated with having to close an hour before bars in nearby Fairfield or Deerfield townships. “This country is built on competition,” the owners ...
Malaysia Star
“My only concern is how I will face my mother in the future,” said the 31-year-old man, who declined to be named. He also said that he would leave the case to the police. Last Wednesday, the 57-year-old woman had allegedly killed the girl before ...
BusinessWeek
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.
Daily Mail
Medical experts expect him to recover by March end,' a person close to the family added. Yuvraj's father Yograj refused to comment on his son's medical problem. 'I do not want to discuss it, please,' he said. It was also learnt that Yuvraj took ...
BusinessWeek
From its launch in 1993 through 2010, PDT, which invests only Morgan Stanley money, has returned an estimated annual average of more than 20 percent, according to a person close to the group. Gorman has also been getting rid of the clutter the bank ...
USA TODAY
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 ...
STLtoday.com
Last week, The Associated Press reported that officials in Israel _ all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss Iran _ were concerned that the measures, while welcome, were constraining Israel in its ability ...
China Daily
A doctor with the hospital, who asked not to be named, said on Sunday that it is a penetrating gunshot injury, and there is a hole on each side of Wen's head. The incident terrified many of the residents of the neighborhood.
Reuters
Another airport source who asked not to be named, said Mallawany was traveling to the Emirates. Mallawany could not be immediately reached to comment. Following the fall of President Hosni Mubarak last year by a popular uprising, the Egyptian public ...
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 |