Thread by @davidfickling

It's grotesque for journalists to grant sources anonymity so they can make these veiled threats of violence without putting their names to it.

There's a lot of very talented journalists in Westminster but the institutional norms are horrible and damaging to democracy.

https://twitter.com/alexwickham/status/1177207473129889792

I think there was an oddly important fork in the road in British and American journalism around the time of the Iraq war.

Major scoops about pre-war intelligence turned out to be false but whereas U.S. journalists responded by tightening up their act, the Brits failed to change.

In the U.S. it was Judith Miller, the New York Times' star national security reporter. Her scoops provided a lot of fodder for the argument that Iraq had an active WMD program.

Much of this reporting turned out to be based on dodgy and fabricated information from Ahmed Chalabi, an exiled Iraqi politician working with a DC lobbying firm who wanted to be a powerbroker in postwar Iraq.

After this came out there was a huge bout of soul-searching at the Times -- self-flagellating editorials and post-mortems whose ripples are still being felt. nytimes.com/2004/05/26/wor…

The main takeaway was that journalists have to be *much* tougher with anonymous sources.

Why is this person talking to me? How does this benefit them? How reasonable is their justification for seeking anonymity? Am I giving too much away to my source? publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/15/new…

On the other side of the Atlantic the big story was around a reporter knocking down the sort of reports Judith Miller was writing -- Andrew Gilligan.

He'd been hired for BBC Radio 4's flagship Today programme to generate more investigative scoops by its editor Rod Liddle, a former punk who seemed to relish getting up people's noses.

Gilligan met with a British weapons expert from the Ministry of Defence, David Kelly, and put out reports based on that saying that Tony Blair's chief spin doctor Alastair Campbell had "sexed up" a dossier on Iraqi WMD by inserting made-up claims about launching in 45 minutes.

It's worth remembering that this reporting would *never have got to print* in the U.S.

It was, incontestably, based on a single source (ironic, given that one of the problems it cited with the "45 minutes" claim in the dossier was that it was single-source and thus unreliable).

More to the point, Kelly only had second-hand information. He had seen drafts of the dossier but wasn't involved in the process so didn't know why it had changed or who had done it.

Gilligan turned *speculation* Campbell was responsible into a reported *fact*.

The wider background was very different, and tragic. Kelly outed himself to his bosses as Gilligan's source and was then outed to the public, and came in for a brutal cross-examination in parliament.

A few days after one of these sessions he went out to a forest near his home and took his own life.

One of the last messages he received was an email from Judith Miller.

I think it's striking that British journalism really didn't reckon with what went wrong in that case.

One part if it is they got the big picture right: The WMD claims being put out by the New York Times and British government were exaggerated or fabricated.

Another is that they observed the old media dictum: "Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post."

Both the Times and the BBC got their stories wrong, but at least Today was discomfiting the powerful.

Still, I think the unfortunate result was that there was *no* soul-searching in British journalism about whether relying on single, indirect, speculation-as-fact, anonymous sources was a problem.

Reporting standards that were sloppy before 2003 continued to slide.

People rightly focus a lot on the sins of British tabloid journalism -- hacking the phones of murdered teenagers, etc. -- but I think people in the U.K. rarely realize how much even the quality media is held in low esteem in the U.S.

American reporters will generally not even try very hard to follow or match a scoop in the U.K. media. It's just assumed to all be badly-sourced bullshit, by default.

I remember when I worked at the FT we took great pride that *sometimes* the U.S. media would chase our scoops.

To be clear: Granting sources anonymity to put out slander and innuendo only helps the source.

It's a disservice to the reader and the truth.

The reporter puts their own reputation on the line for the sake of their source.

Journalists don't seek second sources out if prissy perfectionism but because you need independent confirmation to make sure you're not being lied to, and thus relaying lies to your readers.

The principle is the same in police work and intelligence.

There's plenty of problems in U.S. journalism but *investigative reporting* has held up amazingly well in recent years.

Even the notorious "Investigating Trump's Ties to Russia, FBI Sees No Clear Link" story from October 2016 had some solid reporting:
nytimes.com/2016/11/01/us/…

What's striking, in fact, is that if you pull the facts out of that story it's quite damning and compelling. The problem is that they're drowned out by the way the sources characterized their investigation ("no clear link") which turned out to be, in most parts, false.

Which is the same lesson again! Rely on your anonymous sources to tell you only facts. Get those facts confirmed by other sources. And then be *extremely suspicious* of how your sources are spinning those facts.

British journalism falls at the first hurdle. (ends)