By Joel Thurtell
Back in 2003 when I was investigating U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr.’s abuse of staffers, I had anonymous sources for the first stories, and that was very okay with editors.
Something changed, though, and I was prohibited from pursuing the story by using unnamed sources.
What a contrast with today’s Detroit Free Press, where unnamed sources seem to populate every scoop.
I was shut down on Conyers after breaking the story. Why? Well, I don’t know. We’d had an impact. The House Ethics Committee was investigating Conyers as a result of our reporting. Was that, maybe, why I was stopped? You wouldn’t have known there was an ethics probe going on from reading the Free Press. That story was broken months after I learned of it by other media. When we were beaten by the Detroit News, I was allowed to use my source without giving her name. But the bar was immediately raised and thereafter the story was mute at the Freep. Until, once again, we were beaten by other media on a part of the story I had written literally years earlier but was barred from putting in the paper.
Why? Were we too close to getting Conyers in the same mess his late colleague Charles Diggs got into when he assigned federally-paid staffers to work in his family mortuary? The feds called that fraud and they made it stick. Diggs did stir time.
Maybe there was another reason. Who knows? I was told by management that my chief source — a member of Conyers’ staff — should agree to be identified as my source although in early stories, she was an unnamed source.
Why the pressure to put her on the record? I never understood it. I was told to persuade her to let us use her name. I was pressured by bosses at the Free Press to out my source, or at least to bulldoze her into outing herself. Nasty business, how we treat our sources. Sometimes.
When I refused to push, the response was simple: End of Conyers investigation.
Now I look at Kwamegate. Free Press reporters got 14,000 supposedly off-limits text messages and really made hay with them. Next, anonymous sources leak all kinds of nasty stuff about Detroit City Council members supposedly taking bribes. Who are these leakers, anyway? Is it in the public interest to publish possibly one-sided, untested allegations before a grand jury indicts someone?
Now we’ve got the Free Press quoting “sources said” that the governor maybe made an indiscreet phone call that may not have happened and maybe, if it did, wasn’t indiscreet.
I can’t help harking back to the way I was pushed to con my main Conyers source into letting us use her name, even though it likely would have got her fired.
Not a nice thing in and of itself, getting a source fired. Besides which it ends the source’s usefulness as a source. Hmmm. I wonder…
Nothing wrong with using an anonymous source if the story is REALLY important. But “sources said” has reached epidemic levels at the Free Press. It’s undermining whatever credibility the paper had.
Now here at joelontheroad.com, we use anonymous sources, but very sparingly. We make noe deals. For instance, we don’t promise anyone we’ll go to jail rather than identify them.
We feel it’s necessary to give some cover to sources, especially those who work for the Free Press and pass information to us. There is indeed a fear of retaliation by the bosses. Having sat beside a colleague when he was fired by Free Press management, only to be reinstated by decree of an arbitrator nine months later, and having fought with The Newspaper Guild’s help the Free Press’ attempt to stifle my political activity, I do believe retaliation is more than a minor possibility.
But as I read the ongoing use of anonymous sources by Freepsters, I’m beginning to think the paper needs to go cold turkey.
It’s time the Conyers standard were applied generally to the Free Press staff.
If your sources won’t come out, at least give us a valid reason for hiding them.
Otherwise, stop using them.
If that kills stories, so be it.
Contact me at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
