Anonymous source tracker
Continuously updated examples of the media's use of anonymous sources
The senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, says that intelligence indicates the threat is much broader than the two refugees. Authorities learned of the Kentucky plot through ...
Economic Times
The hiring might not happen, said the sources, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private. Other companies also are trying to recruit Cornell, one person said. Peter Land, a PepsiCo spokesman, declined to comment on Saturday.
The Japan Times
A senior US official told Japanese officials in late January that Futenma Air Station will have to stay in Ginowan, Okinawa Prefecture, for the time being because of the standoff over its relocation plan, sources close to bilateral relations said ...
Oxford Press
Other neighbors who did not want to be identified said it's as bad as any accident they've seen at the intersection before. Most of the time, the accidents happen there because of people not paying attention, a neighbor said.
KSDK
A woman onboard the Ruby Princess cruise ship who did not want to be identified on camera still wanted to tell her story after she was infected with a gastrointestinal virus. "No accommodations for how horrible it was nobody from the crew bothered to ...
Nigerian Tribune
A combined effort by some international intelligence bodies, including the Central Intelligence Agency(CIA) of the United States of America (USA) has been launched in search of top kingpins of the dreaded Islamic sect, Boko Haram, sources said on ...
The Daily Star
By Hussein Dakroub, Hasan Lakkis BEIRUT: Prime Minister Najib Mikati will not resume stalled Cabinet sessions before agreement is reached on a formula to make the government productive, rather than a venue for futile bickering, government sources said ...
Times of India
Family sources said Yuvi, who has made many comebacks into the Indian team, is determined to overcome the disease. They said the chemo sessions had begun and he had lost weight. "He is showing common after-effects of the treatment - loss of appetite ...
Times of India
The peak hour demand in the state at present is around 3000 mega watt and is expected to head north during the summer months, official sources said on Saturday. The average power demand is around 2400 MW. "We are somehow managing by regulating hydro ...
Wall Street Journal
A stumbling block remains the price of Dexma, which the government has valued at €380 million, a price deemed too high by CDC and La Banque Postale, the people familiar with the matter said. Another hurdle is the fate of Dexia's more than 1300 ...
The Borneo Post
A neighbour, who declined to be named, said prior to the incident, their parents had gone out in the afternoon, leaving their 17-year-old daughter to take care of the two siblings. However, Ismail and Ismawi later sneaked out of the house in the ...
The Spoof (satire)
"I thought we would be having a few days off" said a disgruntled employee who refused to be named. The train drivers union confirmed that drivers were planning to strike if they did not get at least a week off due to severe weather.
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 |