If information is true, if it can be verified, and if it's really important, the newspaper needs to be willing to take the risk associated with using unidentified sources.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
If you are a reliable, honest journalist, sources will open up and trust you and share good information.
There's no question that sources sometimes have interests aside from the truth when they talk to reporters. That's why reporters have to very aggressively report against their own theses and against their initial information.
There is no higher claim to journalistic integrity than going to jail to protect a source.
Okay, I'm not in the news business, and I'm not going to tell anyone how to do their job. However, it'd be good to have news reporting that I could trust again, and there's evidence that fact-checking is an idea whose time has come.
In most daily journalism, you only fact-check something if it seems a little fishy.
I couldn't find any way to tell the truth in a regular newspaper.
In any event, the proper question isn't what a journalist thinks is relevant but what his or her audience thinks is relevant. Denying people information they would find useful because you think they shouldn't find it useful is censorship, not journalism.
Newspapers that are truly independent, like The Washington Post, can still aggressively investigate anyone or anything with no holds barred.
It's nice to know about something as soon as it happens, and obviously a newspaper can't provide that.
Sure, some journalists use anonymous sources just because they're lazy and I think editors ought to insist on more precise identification even if they remain anonymous.