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Anonymous sources in journalism, as I wrote last week, rarely are used for your benefit. They most often serve as political cover for manipulators of public opinion, who want to hide their credentials and motivations from scrutiny.

They also can be a writing crutch, which, at its worst, can lead to a false worldview, as , , , and – among others – have infamously demonstrated. So they are, philosophically, as instructs,

Yet – practically speaking – anonymity is offered much more frequently than that ideal. Most of the time, I’d argue, such use is unwarranted.

This column furthers such discussion by isolating a recent Civil Beat example of this practice, an analytical process I will continue in future columns with other media pieces by other organizations. This is not intended to criticize particular journalists and companies, but to illustrate this obscuring technique as a common practice in Hawaii, deserving deeper scrutiny by audiences, reporters and editors.

During this process, I first try to understand the context of the situation, from the details provided, including the description of why anonymity was granted (if there is one). I also try to locate and compare these examples to organizational policy (if available), or industry standards (if not).

I approach each issue like an ordinary reader, not an organizational insider. To summarize my thoughts, I then will make my argument about if the use was warranted or not (feel free to disagree and make a counterargument).

Examples of anonymous sources in local media are not difficult to find. Civil Beat does not appear to be a common offender in this policy realm. Yet I also feel obligated to start in this place, because this is where the Reader Rep column originates, and Civil Beat reader Chaucer Chan, in a March 7 comment about the debut of this new column, lamented a recent story about Sen. Josh Green.

As the Reader Rep, I think my primary obligation is to respond to your questions and concerns about local media. So when I read that Civil Beat piece, to investigate Chan’s concerns, anonymity emerged as the clear culprit. The article, about residency issues for place-based politicians, states:

Now consider the case of Sen. Josh Green, who has served in the Legislature since 2004 and currently represents District 3, the Kona-Kau area of the Big Island.

There is a lot of talk at the Capitol that Green does not spend a whole lot of time on the Big Island and might actually reside here on Oahu. Some complain that he ignores the needs of constituents and that he’s interested in higher office — something he has said publicly — and he has a lot of campaign money should he decide to make the jump.

What follows, I should state first, is a compelling and appropriate inquiry into the primary residence of this legislator, by author Chad Blair. But the question to raise in this Reader Rep column’s context is related to the prompt for the story (or the presentation of the prompt), as through anonymous sources.

Blair writes that rumors circulate regularly in the legislature, and he simply is following one of those leads. Yet by writing that “There is a lot of talk at the Capitol” and “Some complain,” Blair leaves us readers outside of the exclusive club he describes, making us wish we were worthy and could hear these concerns first-hand, rather than Blair letting us fully inside the circle.

My initial response to these passages: Who said what? Whom does this anonymity benefit? And, what is the connection of these people making the complaints about Green?

I’d have a much different feeling about this story if these people are whistleblowing staff members who have been supporters of Green in the past. If they are political opponents trying to tarnish him, though, the use of anonymity is questionable.

Without knowing their identities, I simply cannot make that crucial assessment, and I am left to speculate. As such, and without any explanation from Civil Beat, I speculate that these were political opponents (or, more likely, underlings of political opponents).

Anonymity, in that respect, robs me of my ability to assess the impetus of the story, and my skepticism about political actors leads me to this conclusion. While Green’s residency issue is a legitimate question to pursue – regardless of what started the discussion – pinning “whispers rising” as the impulse to report the story gives it a false sense of timeliness and a shady backdrop.

The reason the impulse in this case matters is because media organizations set the agendas of public discourse; they might not tell people how to think, but they tell them what to think about. So if backstage manipulators are setting the agenda, rather than the independent journalists, our public discourse is at stake.

Civil Beat publishes its policy about anonymous sources online, which is an admirable form of transparency that all media organizations should follow. That policy states: “We use anonymous sources only for substantive, factual information; not for opinion, personal criticism or incidental information.” And, “We explain why we granted anonymity.”

Yet I do not see an explicit explanation of why anonymity was granted to these sources in this story, and I also do not see how this packaging of various anonymous criticisms adds any substantive information to the otherwise well-reported piece.

So, in this case, Civil Beat did not follow its policy and should not have included those sections of the piece. The story would have been just as strong without them, and the use of the anonymous sources instead distracts from the real issues being presented.

In future columns, I will continue to highlight and investigate uses of anonymous sources in local media. Send me examples you spot.

Audiences also need to be literate about other questionable practices with journalistic sources that shape the ways in which they receive and interpret the news. So I plan to outline frameworks for inquiring about those as well in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, keep me posted about what you are seeing and hearing in local media that raises procedural questions or creates other types of curiosities about any behind-the-scenes journalistic behaviors.