Replies

Anonymous sources. I smell horsedump!

I was a newspaperman for 25 years but never made the big leagues. You might say my career topped out at AA ball.

But I can tell you that no managing editor I ever worked under would allow anonymous sources except under the rarest of circumstances.

In these relatively small media markets, we were accountable to our readers in a way these big-time journalists can never understand.

We knew that if we screwed up, our phones would be ringing off the hook and we’d probably be catching hell over lunch at the local beaneries the next day.

We may not have been the most elegant writers on the planet — and we sure as heck didn’t have any Ivy Leaguers on staff.

But we at least learned to recognize a fact if it bit us on the backside.

“If a story’s too good to be true, it probably is.” I learned this lesson from several old-time editors.

In the interest of full disclosure to my readers, I am paraphrasing here. But this is still an accurate description of how I was taught.

Unfortunately, nearly all the good news people I worked with are retired or dead. The current generation not only has contempt for facts, they can’t push a noun against a verb without crashing.

What have they done to the profession I loved? As a lifelong bachelor I used to say I was “married to the news business” for 25 years.

I was wrong. I’m a widower.