For an administration flamboyantly vowing new levels of transparency, the Obama White House continuously relies upon one of the most un-transparent political weapons:  namely, disseminating to the public — typically through sympathetic journalists — purely pro-administration assertions while hiding behind a journalistically baseless grant of anonymity.  There are numerous manipulative and distorting effects from having government officials make pronouncements while remaining anonymous, one of the most significant of which is that there is no accountability whatsoever when they make false or misleading statements.  Today we have a perfect illustration of that lack of accountability.

In order to assuage concerns among progressives that the Obama administration intends to follow in the Bush administration’s footsteps by trying to cut Social Security benefits, high-level Obama officials have been telling journalists such as The American Prospect‘s Ezra Klein — on the condition of anonymity — that they have no intention of touching Social Security, producing reports which then faithfully communicate that message, such as this one from Klein, two weeks ago:

What people at the White House have told me on Social Security — and what I wrote in the post she’s referencing — is that there’s no intention to touch Social Security in the foreseeable future. It’s not a priority and it’s not a political winner. . . . The problem, they say, is health care, not Social Security, and that’s where the White House is focusing.

Based on those same anonymous conversations, Klein wrote other posts telling progressives who are worried about Obama’s intention to cut Social Security that they were worrying about something that doesn’t exist.

But in The New York Times today, David Brooks recounted what he described as “conversations with four senior members of the administration.”  Those unnamed Obama officials all called Brooks in order to refute his column from last week which argued “that the Obama budget is a liberal, big government document that should make moderates nervous.”  Brooks — like Klein — granted anonymity to and then proceeded to quote all four ”senior members of the Obama administration” (a) without explaining why he did so, (b) without describing efforts, if any, to persuade them to use their names and (c) without providing any information about who they are or what their motives might be (all flagrant violations of the supposed NYT policy governing the use of anonymity).  These paragraphs were the result of the anonymity Brooks gave to the Obama White House (emphasis in original):

Besides, the long-range debt is what matters, and on this subject President Obama is hawkish.

He is extremely committed to entitlement reform and is plotting politically feasible ways to reduce Social Security as well as health spending.

What Klein’s anonymous White House sources told him (“there’s no intention to touch Social Security in the foreseeable future”) is directly contrary to what Brooks’ anonymous White House sources, two weeks later, told him (Obama “is extremely committed to entitlement reform and is plotting politically feasible ways to reduce Social Security”).  But there’s no way to resolve those contradictory White House claims because Klein and Brooks allowed these officials to hide behind anonymity when making these claims.  That’s what anonymity does — it allows dubious or even false government claims to be spouted with impunity and without any accountability. 

That’s why anonymity is such a valuable weapon for government officials and such a risky and questionable practice for journalists.  If the claims from Klein and Brooks’ sources are true about the intentions of the White House, then why can’t they just attach their names to those claims and why aren’t they made to do so by the journalists before having their statements amplified to the public?

This practice was so widely abused during the Bush presidency that journalists and their news organizations engaged in all kinds of tortured public discussions — and even promulgated guidelines for the proper use of anonymity — all of which, since then, have been almost entirely ignored.  There are, of course, narrow circumstances in which anonymity is not only justifiable but crucial — namely, when whistle-blowing government officials risk their jobs or even careers to divulge damaging information that the Government wants to hide — but that obviously isn’t how anonymity is being used in the vast majority of cases by Beltway journalists, such as those documented here.  

Instead, anonymity is now eagerly granted to any government official the minute they ask for it — even when they are doing nothing but spouting the official, pro-administration line — by journalists eager to be chosen as the White House’s anointed message-carrier and who are therefore willing to agree to any conditions imposed by the White House in exchange for that “honor.”  In 2005, The Washington Post‘s Walter Pincus described the harm that comes from such casual use of anonymity:

But no matter what legal protections exist, journalists should pause before handling information received from people who demand anonymity. Reporters should avoid promising anonymity to sources if it is being offered simply to encourage the source to say something in a dramatic or damaging way that the source would not say on the record. This use of anonymity harms the profession and diminishes the value of the confidentiality given to those who are whistleblowers—people who risk their jobs and jail for what they may believe is a higher cause.

Or, as supreme journalist Izzy Stone put it in explaining how the U.S. Government was able, with such ease, to disseminate so many lies to the public through journalists during the Vietnam War (h/t Jeff Cohen):   ”The process of brain-washing the public starts with off-the-record briefings for newspapermen. . . .”

I’m not singling out Brooks and Klein here.  This is how Beltway journalism largely functions.  Obama officials routinely are allowed to speak to the public while hiding behind journalist-granted anonymity, just as Bush officials did.  It’s the central objection I had to Marc Ambinder’s reporting on the state secrets controversy:   by granting anonymity to DOJ officials to justify without challenge why the administration did what it did, those government officials were allowed to spout utter nonsense, filled with internally contradictory and incoherent claims, without any accountability whatsoever, because they were allowed — with zero journalistic justification — to hide behind a wall of anonymity when making their case.  While this practice is pervasive, it’s also squarely at odds with the rules which journalists claim to affirm regarding the use of anonymity.