Anonymous source tracker
Continuously updated examples of the media's use of anonymous sources
... is in talks with several private equity firms about a potential investment in exchange for a minority stake, people briefed on the matter said. ...
Wilkes Barre Times-Leader
“All we do is come here and ride and dig,” said one teenager who declined to give his name. “I just can't believe it.” Joe Hoinski, 15, of Forty Fort, ...
Aljazeera.net
... to a new dangerous trend with huge ramifications for the media and society in general," one senior Mexican journalist, who asked not to be named, said. ...
Express Buzz
“Some of the officials were using these vehicles for personal purposes,” said a BBMP official who did not wish to be identified. ...
BusinessWeek
... the broadcast signal for races from other states, according to the lawmaker, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the meeting was private. ...
Nashua Telegraph
“An idea whose time has come is alive with the presence of the soon-to-be delivered child,” Day said, quoting an anonymous source to about 70 people ...
SearchCloudComputing.com
Now you are stuck behind an anonymous source, with both parties not supporting your statement of dumping and we, the readers, are left in the dark because ...
Boston Herald
Burgess spent another day away from Gillette Stadium contemplating retirement, according to a source close to him. The two-time Pro Bowler, who turns 32 in ...
Boston Globe
... a fire official with direct knowledge of the investigation who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about a medical condition. ...
Patch
One 26-year resident, who asked that his name not be used, isn't so sure that his neighborhood will see any big improvement this year. ...
Cape Coral Daily Breeze
The other man, who asked that his name not be used during a telephone interview Friday, called 911 at 4:35 pm - 21 minutes before Hooker placed a call to ...
Albany Times Union
"They've been warning her that it's illegal to drive the golf cart on the road," said a NYRA security guard who asked that his name not be used. ...
About the tracker
The goal of the anonymous source tracker is to make the media's use of anonymous sources more transparent. It's an experiment, and as such it's imperfect and subject to change.
While it finds many examples of the use of anonymous sources, it doesn't find all anonymous sources used by newspapers, magazines, TV stations, wire services or other news outlets online.
It gets its examples from the English version of Google News. Phrases commonly used to identify anonymous sources are fed to Google News, which produces an Atom feed for each phrase. Those feeds are then combined under a single label, "anonymous," in Google Reader. That feed is public. Every hour a PHP script grabs the Google Reader feed, extracts the summary text, highlights the anonymous source phrasing, and puts it in a database to display on the anonymous source tracker.
Some examples are rejected, even though the articles they point to used anonymous sources, because the anonymous source phrasing isn't in the summary.
Some examples are duplicates. If a URL is already in the database, those examples are rejected. But sometimes the same story can have different URLs, so the same story can appear more than once. The same wire story may also be run by multiple outlets.
The news outlets scanned are the same outlets scanned by Google News. I don't know what criteria Google News uses to decide whether to include a Web site.
Typically Google returns a search result for a phrase giving a summary for only one outlet, with an "and more" link pointing to other matches for stories on the same subject. The anonymous source tracker doesn't grab those "and more" results, so many examples are undoubtedly missed.
I don't know how Google does what it does or why, or why one outlet is given prominence for a given search while another isn't, so I don't know if all outlets are being treated equally by the anonymous source tracker.
The count for each news outlet doesn't include every anonymously sourced story produced by that outlet. The counts shouldn't be considered valid rankings.
To quote Donald Rumsfeld, "there are known unknowns."
"That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don't know we don't know."
| BusinessWeek | 2,932 |
| Wall Street Journal | 2,455 |
| Reuters | 1,836 |
| The Associated Press | 1,033 |
| New York Times | 834 |
| Washington Post | 650 |
| Bloomberg | 386 |
| New York Daily News | 362 |
| Financial Times | 332 |
| AFP | 331 |
| Los Angeles Times | 302 |
| New York Times (blog) | 299 |
| Livemint | 267 |
| Economic Times | 266 |
| ESPN | 251 |
| New York Post | 228 |
| San Francisco Chronicle | 195 |
| Boston Globe | 190 |
| CNN | 164 |
| Philadelphia Inquirer | 163 |
| Hindustan Times | 157 |
| FOXNews | 152 |
| Washington Post (blog) | 131 |
| The Star-Ledger - NJ.com | 130 |
| ABC News | 129 |
| San Jose Mercury News | 125 |
| Times of India | 122 |
| Los Angeles Times (blog) | 114 |
| Chicago Sun-Times | 112 |
| Wall Street Journal (blog) | 112 |
| MarketWatch | 107 |
| Reuters India | 106 |
| Business Standard | 103 |
| MiamiHerald.com | 103 |
| Chicago Tribune | 101 |
| The Guardian | 98 |
| Daily Mail | 91 |
| Sydney Morning Herald | 91 |
| Examiner.com | 88 |
| msnbc.com | 88 |
| Detroit Free Press | 86 |
| Seattle Times | 86 |
| UPI.com | 86 |
| CNN International | 85 |
| Telegraph.co.uk | 85 |
| Xinhua | 85 |
| Globe and Mail | 83 |
| Boston Herald | 81 |
| NASDAQ | 79 |
| Montreal Gazette | 77 |

