Conservatives were understandably less skeptical of anonymous sources in the Obama years. Anonymous administration officials who “asked not to be quoted” described a “heated debate” among Obama’s senior staff over whether or not to seek congressional approval for strikes on Syria. The president later claimed unanimity in his decision to defer to Congress. Fifty anonymous sources confirmed to Nancy Youssef and Shane Harris, both formerly of The Daily Beast, that U.S. Central Command had doctored intelligence on the ISIS threat to more closely resemble Barack Obama’s dismissive take on the terrorist group. When that scandal grew legs, analysts who complained of being forced out as a result of their willingness to blow the whistle spoke to the press anonymously about it.
Unnamed government officials spilled the beans on the Department of Justice’s surveillance of Associated Press journalists, going so far as to reveal the existence of a grand jury empaneled to review the criminality of leaks to reporters. The former administration was so resentful toward whistleblowers that reporters described chafing at the precautions they had to take to avoid being targeted by the Obama Justice Department for prosecution.
The frustrations and inaccuracies that occasionally result from relying on anonymous sources are not new and, during the last administration, were widely evinced by pro-Obama partisans. In a 2013 piece, former New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan described readers’ irritation with the paper’s reliance on unnamed sources and prescribed some ways in which the paper could regain the trust of its audience—either with more careful sourcing or more descriptive blurbs about the unnamed sources cited. In recent weeks, a deluge of “bombshells” has rendered news consumers shell-shocked. Sure, some of those bombshells are better sourced than others, but the proliferation of revelatory dispatches has a lot more to do with Donald Trump than the press.
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