Anonymous “Democrats” feeding a major Wall Street Journal feature that suddenly pumped new life into the “Sleepy Joe” Biden narrative. Unnamed “senior Labor figures” keeping the Payman “revenge” agenda ticking over in Canberra courtesy of The Australian front page. It’s remarkable the access the proudly right-wing News Corp media has — often uniquely — to unidentified sources who happen to be expressing views damaging to centre-left parties.
It’s one of News Corp’s big contributions to journalism practice: the unnamed insider with a take that sustains the media narrative of the moment.
For News Corp, it’s one of the core innovations designed to combat the internet’s disruption of its traditional business model: how to sustain its influence when its journalism sits largely unread behind the hardest of paywalls with an over-70 subscriber base that is, literally, dying.
Now, in the United States, that bastion of old-style just-the-facts journalism, The New York Times, seems to have decided: sure could do with some of that! The result? A major campaign to force Biden out of this year’s presidential race off the back of his poor debate performance with, according to Chicago journalist Jennifer Schulze, 142 news stories and 50 opinion pieces over the course of the subsequent week.
As former NYT Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah Jones responded: “As media, we consistently proclaim that we are just reporting the news when in fact we are driving it. What we cover, how we cover it, determines often what Americans thinks [sic] is important and *how* they perceive these issues yet we keep pretending it is not so.”
Setting a narrative — particularly at this scale — depends on trust. Trust by other journalists to push the narrative on, and trust by your readership that the sources are people who matter, are representative, and are quoted accurately to reflect the point the source wanted to make.
The proliferation of the anonymous source in political writing has turned on its head a once-radical journalistic conviction; the post-Watergate belief that only outsider anonymous sources could truly be trusted to tell the truth, summed up by All The President’s Men co-author Carl Bernstein: “Reporting is almost uniformly based on anonymous sourcing in part because that’s the only way we can get to the truth.”
It’s a thesis based on US journalism’s muck-racking traditions, exemplified by I.F.Stone’s more famous quote: “All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.”
This useful scepticism has been hardened into a cynical article of faith. And like so much of the post-sixties radical critique of state institutions and establishment media, it’s been weaponised by the right from Reagan to Murdoch to undermine confidence in government and trust in media.
We should be more sceptical about what we don’t know. Sometimes, the journalist plays the source — hunting for the line they’re after, to shift the narrative of the moment. Sometimes it’s the source playing the journalist, grinding their personal or factional axe.
Keeping a source confidential denies the reader the answer to the first of the journalistic Ws: Who? It’s why Australia’s journalism code of ethics says journalists should be wary: “Aim to attribute information to its source. Where a source seeks anonymity, do not agree without first considering the source’s motives and any alternative attributable source.”
Take News Corp’s big Friday exclusive, puffed across all its platforms with “Citizenship revenge: Labor targets rebel” bannering its agenda-setting masthead. It was a win-win moment for the agenda-setters, keeping the story alive into the weekend and identifying Labor as divided, vengeful and administratively lax.
The story creaked on rickety foundations, shored up only by unnamed “ALP figures” making the bleeding obvious point that dual citizenship was a matter for the High Court, sent teetering by an on-the-record dismissal from Bill Shorten.
But it was the perfect agenda-setting story for News Corp, keeping the spotlight on Canberra’s personality-focussed obsessions while wedging the ALP, appealing to the Labor-split narrative being run by the conservatives and the government bullies line being run by the anti-Labor left.
The only serious account of the entire matter — the one that did the actual leg work of, you know, reporting — was by Nikki Savva in the Nine mastheads, relying on multiple on-the-record sourced quotes that trusted readers to make up their own minds.
Both the “will he stay, or will he go, now” Biden frenzy in the US and the Payman mean girls narrative in Canberra is being told with call-outs from the wings. We need a media that centres the political actors on stage — not to talk about themselves (much less each other), but to explain how their actions will deliver the change they claim to seek.
