Anonymity Is Having a Moment
But when is it justified?
Within newsrooms, the question of when it’s appropriate to use anonymous sources is frequently debated. It’s one of the many kinds of conversations—crucial and complicated—that’s not typically visible to the public. But recently, anonymity has bubbled over into national conversation, too, amplified by a president who frequently condemns it.
There was the anonymous by a senior White House official. The publication of Bob Woodward’s . The anonymously sourced story that could potentially lead to Rod Rosenstein’s from the Justice Department. In a , the British novelist E. M. Forster grappled with this very subject: Anonymity, he argued, is best suited for fiction—and dangerous in newspapers.
