On Deep Throats and deep throating.

There was an interesting front-page story in the Washington Post last week. Entitled "Hussein Loyalists Suspected in Attack" and written by Anthony Shadid, the article asserted that pro-Saddam remnants of the defeated Baath Party dictatorship (or whatever the fashionable term is these days) were likely responsible for last week's bombing of the U.N. compound. Here's a key section from the piece, which quotes an unnamed "senior U.S. official":

Citing intelligence gathered in Iraq, the official called the attack the latest sign of growing sophistication on the part of Hussein loyalists, who are thought to number in the thousands?

"We believe it's homegrown," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "They're getting much more sophisticated in their attacks."

Farther down in the piece, Shadid quotes a U.S. official who, unlike the first source, was willing to go on the record. Thomas Fuentes, the special agent in charge of FBI operations in Iraq, more or less directly contradicted the first source:

Despite the size of the blast, Fuentes and other officials were dismissive of the planning and expertise involved?

"I can't comment that it required a great degree of sophistication and planning to create that," Fuentes said.

This is a nice piece of work, and a lot like about 10,000 other Iraq articles that have hit the newsstands since last summer. The unnamed source goes up top and levels the sensational accusations and tosses in provocative numbers and statistics ("thought to number in the thousands"). Then, 15 paragraphs down, some guy brave enough to go on the record puts forward the sober "We have no frigging idea what's going on" quote, and readers are left to decide whose information to be most impressed by.

Unnamed sources are all about context. Most of the time, you can see why the source might want to remain anonymous: It's information that contradicts a higher-up or an official position, it's something scandalous, it's something speculative or potentially embarrassing to an ally.

A whistleblower naturally wants to be anonymous; the time to be really suspicious of an anonymous source is when you can't understand why the leak had to be leaked. When an "official, speaking on condition of anonymity," leaks to the reporter the news that the war in Iraq is "going just great" and that the Iraqi people think U.S. soldiers are "just the coolest," you have to wonder what the hell is going on.

The Shadid story is a great example. Why, one wonders, would anyone in the military need to anonymously blame the U.N. bombing on "Saddam loyalists"? They blame every other goddamn thing on "Saddam loyalists" on the record: Why do it off the record here?

Most people assume that the problem posed by unnamed sources is primarily one of journalistic ethics. The prevailing assumption is that unnamed sources allow dishonest journalists too much leeway to make baseless accusations and push frivolous stories onto the public. The classic unnamed-source story was Watergate. Though later vindicated by history, Woodward and Bernstein were initially blasted for relying on unnamed sources in the early stages of the story.

More recently, there have been a number of cases in which journalists who use unnamed sources were pilloried in print for their tactics. Writer J.H. Hatfield was roundly blasted for the sensational accusation made against George Bush in the afterword of his book, Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President. Hatfield cited unnamed sources to argue that Bush had been busted for cocaine use in the 1970s, and that he had used family connections to hush the affair up.

BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan, the reporter on the now-notorious "sexed up" story, is being crucified over the use of an unnamed source, and his prolonged battle with the Blair administration has led to calls for stiffer sourcing rules at the BBC.

Lastly, of course, there has been, in the wake of the Jayson Blair mess, no end of indignation about journalistic excesses, particularly as regards loose sourcing. Some publications have even been moved in recent times to publish new codes of ethics. The idea that anonymous sources should only be used as a "last resort" is often a central pillar of these manifestos.

Here's an example from just a few weeks ago, when the editor of the Indianapolis Star, Dennis Ryerson, published an open letter to readers congratulating himself on his decision to kill a story on a kidnapping victim that was based on two anonymous sources. "Our policy on staff-written stories," Ryerson boasted, "is to use only credible information from sources we know and can trust, and to use unnamed stories very, very rarely?only as a last resort to get the most essential information."

The day before Ryerson's letter ran, the AP ran an article called "Terror Report Said to Examine Saudi Link." Here's an excerpt of the piece: "The report suggests that one, and possibly two, Saudi men who encountered the hijackers or their acquaintances were tied to Saudi intelligence and that a Muslim imam in the United States may have been a facilitator for some hijackers, sources said, speaking only on condition of anonymity."

There's the catch with the whole unnamed sources business. Journalists these days are often blasted?in many cases justly?for not applying the proof standards of a criminal prosecutor to their exposes about corruption or government deception. But when the government itself wants to accuse a foreign power (Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia) of collaborating with terrorists, or to provide the reasons for a war, and it chooses to do so with anonymous leaks, no one bats an eyelid.

Almost every day, the major dailies and the tv networks rely upon unnamed "senior U.S. officials" or "Pentagon sources" to tell us all kinds of things about what's going on in the world. A large part of this information has soon after turned out to be idiotic fabrication or absurd propaganda. A typical example is the appalling story about Jessica Lynch by Washington Post reporters Susan Schmidt and Vernon Loeb. Entitled "She Was Fighting to the Death," the two shameless hacks cited unnamed Army sources in fashioning a Hollywood-style tale of heroic escape: Lynch "fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers" after Iraqi soldiers ambushed her supply team, "firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition."

There are lots of reasons why journalists allow government sources to go off the record. One is that they're stupid and will believe anything they're told. Reporters who lack that quality will generally not be promoted by a major daily to service in a place like Iraq. Another is that they're hooked on the conspiratorial rush one gets from having secret sources. A third is that in third-person straight-news reporting, they can't have their own opinions, so they have to find someone else to make their points for them. A fourth is that decades of service in the business leaves them unwilling to trust their own instincts?instincts being generally discouraged in most big media organizations?and unwilling to print anything that doesn't respectfully include at least some official version of events.

But the biggest reason they do it is because they have no balls. I will buy a steak dinner for the first New York Times or Washington Post reporter who can prove that he told a Bush or Pentagon spokesman to "fuck off unless you're willing to go on the record." We'll all grow old waiting for that to happen. After all, what whore ever insisted on foreplay?