It's basic to news work that whenever possible you tell your readers and listeners where your information comes from. The idea is that they have a right to know who stands behind a statement, how well-informed the source is and whether it is the best source.
Good reporters worry when people they quote insist on remaining anonymous. They especially worry about using such sources when they are not firsthand. But they reason that they have to balance the drawbacks with the need to get information not available elsewhere.Thus reporters have resorted to the dangerous practice of using unnamed and secondary sources to penetrate the smokescreens in the convoluted financial and personal travails of Congresswoman Enid Greene Waldholtz and her estranged husband Joe.
TV too often tends to shorten attribution to the suspicious omnibus expression "sources say." But until the Waldholtz flap, when did you see a story in print that depended heavily on that phrase, or that so incestuously quoted hidden sources used by other media? Especially when have you seen a story in which so much media effort has been invested - in this case not only in Salt Lake City but also in Pittsburgh and Washington - that has been built on so many untold sources? Ever wonder that though so much media artillery is trained on this saga, stories have been filled with such vagueness as what Joe "purportedly" told people?
- YOU CAN BLAME in part the tight-lipped players in the drama, especially the principal ones. For days Enid was in self-imposed seclusion, heard from only from releases cranked out by her office. When she surfaced it was with taciturn comments and then in short TV interviews in which she protested that she was pure as the driven snow, bespoke her desire to tell all when she herself learned the facts and vowed to ride out her term.
Charles Sherrill, KSL's Washington correspondent, tried to question Joe on Nov. 9 about his account at a Washington bank but couldn't get him to comment on camera. He was reduced to reporting Waldholtz's terse denial that there were bad checks and to reporting his own impression that Waldholtz "looked like a man who has just seen a ghost."
And you can blame competition. The Waldholtz affair is a whale of a story that all the media have pursued in full cry. In addition to the political significance, it is a human tragedy, with soap-opera ingredients of mystery and suspense, greed, power, trust and betrayal and filial love and disappointment. Not surprisingly it has caught the national fancy and become so intensely competitive that it has brought out some of the excesses of a media feeding frenzy.
- TWO REPORTERS neck-deep in Waldholtz coverage, Dan Harrie of the Tribune and Bob Bernick of the Deseret News, recognize that attribution has become a problem. Both say, however, that it is often beyond their control, and they are doing their best to cope with it.
Both say that given the circumstances, the papers have had a high level of verification. Both have, for example, insisted on seeing checks bounced by the Wald-holtzes that withheld the identities of the people who were paid with those checks. The papers have gone after court and bank records as well. And the media have been very good at pointing out contradictions between what the record says and what the Waldholtzes have said.
As another safeguard, the papers have been apt at finding not just one but several collateral sources that agree on an important point, as for example in a News story that said "several campaign aides and vendors have said the campaign bounced numerous small checks at times. . . ."
Harrie notes that one difficulty is that so many sources have been federal law officers who feel they can't legally or ethically talk about a pending case or one in which no charges have yet been filed. FBI agents have been identified in court affidavits they filed but not otherwise. One oddity, however, is that while neither the Tribune nor Deseret News zeroed in on who said Joe was withdrawing money from ATM machines following his disappearance, USA Today named the primary source, Kevin Ohlson, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Washington, D.C.
Another reason given is that people close to the story wouldn't speak out because they fear the Waldholtzes. A Tony Semerad story in the Tribune, based on what he said were talks with dozens of people in Pittsburgh, reported early on that while Joe is "at times extravagant and generous to a fault,
heT employs an intimidating style that cows those close to him into silence." But even before its press conference, the Waldholtz family had begun speaking for attribution, and so had other acquaintances - so the explanation is puzzling.
- USING SECONDHAND information is a temptation whenever the sources for a big story are remote and unreliable, as in wartime, or withdrawn and mum, as in the Waldholtz affair.
We have seen USA Today, which put the story on Page 1 last Thursday, quoting the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on how Waldholtz bilked his ailing grandmother. Both the Tribune and the Deseret News used the Post-Gazette as their source to say Waldholtz had his friend Mike McConnell leave a false message about a family trust on an answering machine. (The Tribune said that it had tried unsuccessfully to reach McConnell himself but then went ahead and used this nugget without independently verifying it.)
USA Today said that Elsie Hillman, Republican national committeewoman from Pennsylvania, believes Waldholtz took $350,000 from her, but the source was KSL-TV, not Hillman. The source for a report that a friend of Joe's "insinuated that bad things were going to happen" is not the friend but KSTU-TV. Questions about the Waldholtzes' finances broke into a full fledged media mania when the daily press and broadcasters picked up from The Hill, a Capitol Hill newspaper, unattributed stories about how the FBI was investigating the Waldholtzes.
- MEDIA THAT HAVE TRIED to bar the use of confidential sources have invariably had to change their minds.
When I was working one summer for Dow Jones' old National Observer in Washington, the editor, aspiring to make his paper "the fairest of them all" and to protect its credibility, categorically banned the practice. He reasoned that the reader was entitled to know if the "well-placed Capitol Hill source" named in a story was some underling a reporter had buttonholed in a corridor.
The ban didn't last, because in Washington confidential sources are a way of life. Key officials often will not talk for attribution on sensitive matters.
Many editors nonetheless insist that it is usually possible to get sources on record with more digging, with more patient reporting work. But when a mania is running full bore, patience isn't the media's most prized virtue.