Over one week in February I went through the front pages of four English dailies and the political pages of two Hindi ones, and counted every attribution to an unnamed source. There were sixty-one. I then went through them a second time and asked, of each, what would plausibly happen to the source if they had been named.
For forty-four of the sixty-one, my honest answer was: nothing. A party functionary describing the mood in a meeting. An official confirming a date. A ministry source explaining a schedule that would be published in a fortnight anyway. In several cases the same person had said broadly the same thing on the record to a different outlet in the same week.
I have been a reporter for eleven years and I have used unnamed sources, and I intend to keep using them. That is why I care about this.
Anonymity is a finite thing and we are spending it on the trivial.
Here is the mechanism. The protection a reporter offers a source is not a piece of paper. It is a reputation held collectively by the press — the general, background, ambient belief among people who might talk to us that we do not burn people. That belief is what makes the genuinely dangerous conversation possible: the one with the officer who has seen a file, the one with the person inside an institution that will identify them by the detail if it wants to.
Every time anonymity is granted for a routine confirmation, the granting gets a little more ordinary and a little less meaningful. Not because any individual instance harms anyone — none of my forty-four did — but because the practice as a whole becomes a convention rather than a protection, and a convention is not something an institution feels obliged to respect. If unnamed sources are how the schedule of a ministry meeting is reported, then an unnamed source is not a person taking a risk, it is a formatting choice.
The counterargument is one I have made to my own editor and it is not weak. The routine anonymous quote is how a relationship is built. The functionary who tells you the mood on background this month is the functionary who calls you at ten at night in September, and if you insist on naming him in February you will not get September. Access is cumulative and it is maintained in the small transactions.
I think that is largely true and it does not go where the practice has gone, because it argues for granting anonymity, not for concealing that nothing was at stake. The two are separable and we have stopped separating them.
What I want is one sentence. Not a name — a reason. Not a source in the ministry but a ministry official who was not authorised to speak about a meeting they attended, or an official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the announcement is not yet made. Four extra words that tell a reader what kind of protection is being extended and therefore what weight to put on it.
Some outlets do this. The Hindi papers in my count did it more consistently than the English ones, which surprised me and which I have not been able to explain.
Of the sixty-one, seventeen were the real thing — cases where I could construct a plausible account of somebody losing a posting. Those seventeen are why the convention exists. They were formatted identically to the other forty-four, and a reader had no way at all to tell them apart, which means the seventeen got no more credibility than the schedule confirmations did.