How anonymous sourcing actually works.

Dear readers,

Last month, Vanity Fair rocked Washington, D.C. when they released a feature sourced by a series of candid on-the-record interviews with President Trump’s Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. The story became a multi-day controversy, as members of the Trump team defended her sometimes unflattering assessment of the Trump administration while outsiders tried to understand why such a calculated operator agreed to the interviews at all. Wiles downplayed the most surprising quotes as taken out of context, calling the article a "disingenuously framed hit piece.”

The story was also laced with anonymous quotes and comments “on background” from sources inside the administration. After reading the piece, it reminded me of a story I published in Tangle back in 2021 about how going “off the record” actually works — and what news consumers should make of anonymous sourcing. When I published the piece, Tangle had just a few thousand readers — so I decided it would be fun to republish today as a Friday edition. 

Again, this piece was published in 2021, so many of the news items and context harken back to that time. But it’s still relevant today (and even serves as a bit of a time capsule), and I hope you find it interesting. It has been lightly edited and updated for clarity.

Earlier this week, Miles Taylor revealed that he was the author of the 2018 op-ed in The New York Times titled, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.”

Taylor, who eventually rose to chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, was granted anonymity to publish his piece. His name on the article, “Anonymous,” took on an air of folklore in the media world and amongst political junkies. Everyone wanted to figure out who it was — and for the next two years he managed to stay anonymous, Taylor was long suspected as a potential culprit. Then, not long after the op-ed, he published a book titled Anonymous that detailed his experience in the Trump White House.

When Taylor was revealed as the author this week, some reactions were strong, in part because The New York Times had dubiously identified him as a “senior administration official.” Axios’s Jonathan Swan called it an “embarrassment,” saying, “Turns out the NYT oped page gave an enormous ‘Resistance’ platform to a staffer whose agency green-lit the Trump administration’s most hardline immigration moves, including family separation, during his tenure… I also didn’t realize the definition of ‘senior administration official’ could be *this* expansive. Wasn’t even an agency chief of staff at the time the op-ed ran.” 

That Taylor’s piece was published at all is fascinating. The commonly accepted reasons for granting anonymity to a news source have always been fraught with debate: Can you write the story without them? Are their lives or careers truly in danger if they go on the record?

It’s not as if Taylor’s story wasn’t important. He had an inside look at how Trump thought of and handled immigration, perhaps the most important piece of his 2016 campaign platform. Among his many claims, Taylor alleged that “Trump wanted us to explore gassing, electrifying, and shooting migrants at the border.” He quoted Trump, in 2019, saying, “We get these women coming in with like seven children. They are saying, ‘Oh, please help me! My husband left me!’ They are useless. They don’t do anything for our country. At least if they came in with a husband we could put him in the fields to pick corn or something.”

These kinds of stories, from a member of the Trump administration, are worth reporting on. But there’s also fair criticism that labeling Taylor a “senior administration official” was a gross exaggeration and that someone like him should have been asked to go on the record to tell their story.

Given how important “anonymous” sourcing has become in today’s media landscape, I’d like to offer a brief history of anonymity, followed by some things I’ve heard “off the record” and some useful points to consider when reading anonymous sources.

A brief history.

Let’s start with a simple premise: Anytime you speak to a reporter, you should assume you are on the record.

When I call someone for an interview, there’s typically an understanding that our brief exchange at the beginning of the call is not something I’m going to record — either with a recording device or by typing (unless, of course, something really newsy happens. Which, for whatever it’s worth, has happened: I once called a U.S. senator and as they picked up the phone, they were finishing a conversation with an aide about a bill I was calling about — an exchange that eventually made it into the story).

After that initial exchange, though, I’ll often say something like “just so you know, I’m recording now.” Every reporter has their own style, but this is my way of saying “unless otherwise noted, everything you say from now on is fair game.” In journalism classes, professors try to teach you how to make someone comfortable when a recording device is running. Some reporters like taking notes when they talk to someone and others don’t. I will take notes religiously if I’m interviewing someone without a recording device, but if I have one I’ll only take notes if the conversation is over the phone. In my experience, taking notes makes people nervous.

Merriam-Webster says the first known use of the phrase “off the record” in print was in a New York Tribune story from November of 1918. The phrase was used by Theodore M. Knappen, who was explaining to readers that “nothing was ‘off the record’” in a conversation he was having with an advisor to President Woodrow Wilson. Anonymous sourcing, though, has been around as long as journalism has.

In The Atlantic, Marina Koren aptly summed up the kinds of sourcing you might encounter as a reader: on the record, on background, and off the record:

“Every discussion with a reporter is in some sense a prearranged agreement, whether on the record, on background, or off the record,” explains Adam L. Penenberg, a professor in New York University’s journalism program. “On the record” means anything the source says can be published; “on background” means the information can be published without giving away the source’s name; and “off the record” means the reporter can’t print what the source told them (they can, however, try to verify or corroborate that information with a different source).

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve called someone about a story, they’ve told me they didn’t want to talk, and then they gave me a tip about something I should look into or a person I should speak to. I also can’t tell you how many times someone has said “that’s off the record” after telling me something, which they seem to think is some kind of magic hypnotizing tool that amounts to an ironclad agreement that I can’t write something (that’s not how it works, but more on that in a moment).

Anonymous sourcing is a topic of much debate in media circles. Some journalists want to abolish the practice, saying it takes away the legitimacy of stories and makes readers more skeptical of the press at a time when trust in media is already at an all-time low. The truth, though, is that anonymous sourcing is an important tool for great reporting. Sometimes people simply can’t go on the record — for fear of losing their jobs, death threats, or a lawsuit. Other times, especially in the current administration, people will go off the record in order to undermine someone else on their team and plant a negative story with the press.

As a reader, here are three good tips for how to consider anonymous sourcing:

1. If there are multiple anonymous sources on a story, especially if it’s a precise number, it’s far more trustworthy. If The New York Times writes that “a dozen anonymous sources spoke to us about this story,” that means they have done their homework. If a story is based on one or two anonymous sources, it’s more likely to have some faults or gaps.
2. If the story is “palace intrigue,” it’s worth being skeptical. Palace intrigue is gossip, infighting amongst administration officials, disparaging comments — a kind of public airing of a group’s dirty laundry. This is the way people in politics use the press as a weapon. Anonymous sourcing that offers legitimate intelligence is often more justified and more reliable.
3. Pay attention to descriptions. “A person close to the administration” and “a person close to the president” are very different things (the former being more vague and less reliable than the latter — and an actual “administration official” being the most reliable of all).

Trump.

Few presidents have complained as much about anonymous sourcing as President Trump, which — I have to say — is pretty ironic.

For one, Trump himself is arguably the king of anonymous sourcing. He used to call New York City tabloids under the pseudonym “John Barron” and plant stories about himself. The recordings of these calls are hilarious, and — in retrospect — it’s remarkable that it took so long for people to catch onto his shtick. One reporter confessed that “John Barron” managed to convince him of Trump’s wealth, and he ended up getting into the Forbes 400 as a result. I’ve heard stories from no fewer than six veteran reporters here in New York City who have been dialed up by Trump in an effort to plant a story about himself, both as a businessman and more recently as a presidential candidate.

It’s also true that Trump himself has been an anonymous or unnamed official since getting into the White House. This is one of the worst-kept secrets in D.C. I know of at least one reporter who has personally experienced Trump asking to be used as an off-the-record source, and have heard similar stories from a dozen others secondhand. In 2017, Politico published one of the few stories I’ve seen written about this, explaining how Trump had asked to go on the record and then off the record so many times during a single flight on Air Force One that reporters lost track of what they could print and what they couldn’t.

Trump talks to reporters “on background” frequently, and instructs his administration to do the same. Then, when the story is published with anonymous sources, he will attack it as illegitimate because of the anonymous sources. Of course, sometimes he has a point: A story may actually be sourced anonymously by disgruntled employees or untrustworthy sources, but it’s a game Trump himself participates in fairly regularly. I’d wager there’s a very good chance you’ve read a story citing an anonymous source who was actually the president.

We recently got a glimpse of how this works during Trump’s treatment for Covid-19. White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows told reporters how well Trump was doing fighting the virus, as did his doctors. A few minutes later, though, a memo was blasted out from the pool of reporters that follow the White House around: “A source familiar with the president’s health” had told them, “The president’s vitals over the last 24 hours were very concerning and the next 48 hours will be critical in terms of his care. We’re still not on a clear path to a full recovery.” It was an alarming development that contradicted the news conference we had all just watched.

Shortly after, though, a video emerged of Meadows asking a group of reporters to go off the record while asking to move away from the cameras. Because he was the only senior official at the hospital, it became clear, immediately, that Meadows was the source of this dire update — one that directly contradicted everything he’d just said on record at Walter Reed Hospital.

We’ve seen dozens of similar slip-ups in the past, from all sorts of well known people. One particularly intriguing case happened in 2018 with Elon Musk, who had sent an email to a BuzzFeed reporter that started with the words “Off the record.” The email, though, ended up contradicting Musk’s public comments, and BuzzFeed ran with the story. The reasoning was simple: There was no agreement. You can’t just email a reporter something damning and say it’s off the record and be protected by a kind of unilateral agreement with yourself.

Even if a reporter agrees to go off the record, though, there is still some leeway for them to publish something. The difference, in that scenario, is that they are putting their careers or reputations at risk. I’ve never published something that a source asked to be kept off the record (though I’m about to share a couple of fun stories), but there are times when I would. If, say, someone told me something that was of serious national interest and could change the upcoming election, but asked me to keep it off the record, I would try to use what they had told me to find a way to get the story published without breaking our agreement. But if this person were my only source to prove the story out, and I was certain what they were telling me was true based on other available evidence, I’d have a tough decision to make about what to do.

Some tales.

I’ve had some great stories told to me over the years.