I’m not sure what to make of the report in Esquire yesterday saying indictments of Gov. Chris Christie’s allies are imminent, given that it is tied to a pair of unnamed sources. It certainly is titillating and, for critics of the governor, it offers another chance to get on the soapbox, but it also smacks of the kind of manipulation of the news industry that we have seen too often in the past from law enforcement officials and a failure to ask the right questions about sourcing and motive.
Here is how Esquire described what is happening:
Two sources with intimate knowledge of the case say Fishman’s pace is quickening — he has empaneled a second grand jury, and the U.S. Justice Department has sent assistant prosecutors and FBI agents to work the case.
Esquire doesn’t say why it is allowing these sources to remain anonymous, why it thought the information was so significant it had to be run even without names. And it never asks why the sources in question might want to inject this information into the public ether.
Readers of this blog know I am a consistent critic of the governor. But I also am a consistent critic of the use of unnamed sources. We use them too frequently and for the wrong reasons. The default position of every journalist should be to avoid relying on people who will not give you their names. Does this mean we shouldn’t allow sources to remain anonymous? No. By creating the default position, we force ourselves to ask questions and meet certain requirements before we break with the default. Exceptions must be well-considered and consistently applied and they must be based on a public’s need to know — so that they can protect themselves from danger or corruption, for instance, or so that they understand something they otherwise might not have experience with or access to. For me, the exceptions include (but are not limited to):
- Protecting a source against legitimate retaliation — which can include physical and economic retaliation — when the information is important to protect the public good.
- Protecting a private person’s reputation — for example, granting a homeless person or someone on public assistance anonymity so that he or she will feel comfortable sharing the details of his or her story.
Anonymity often is granted for national security stories, as well, which seems fair in most cases, though I don’t have any experience with that.
What strikes me about the Esquire piece, however, is that it smacks of the kind of abuse you usually see when the unnamed sources come from the law-enforcement community. These stories get leaked for a reason. Sometimes it is the intersection of a person “close to the investigation” wanting to demonstrate his or her significance with the need for reporters to scoop the competition. When that happens, the outcome can sometimes be disastrous — think of the Atlanta Olympics bombing. More often, though, the leak has a specific, but unstated purpose.
Sometimes that purpose is political, as it appears to have been when subpoenas of a nonprofit tied to Sen. Bob Menendez were leaked two months before the 2006 election. The subpoena — which was allegedly tied to an investigation of Menendez’s leasing of space to a nonprofit for whom he also secured federal grants — was grist for the campaign mill and posed a threat to Menendez’s re-election. The investigation, however, went nowhere and was closed in 2011. The Star-Ledger editorial board, which criticized Menendez at the time, published an editorial that re-evaluated its support of the subpoenas and laid out the primary issues — though it doesn’t address why the press ran with the leak without official confirmation. The paper, it said, thought “then-U.S. Attorney Chris Christie was justified” in issuing the subpoenas because the “suspicion was that the group was paying inflated rents to Menendez as part of a corrupt deal.” The subtext is that the papers that ran with the story — and many, if not all, did — were correct to do so. Corruption was the key element.
But there is another side to these stories, especially when they develop from leaks, and that is the potential harm to someone who becomes publicly accused of wrongdoing by an unnamed and unconfirmed source.
As the Ledger said,
These are tough calls. If a prosecutor holds back, he can be accused of protecting the target. If he issues a subpoena too close to an election, he can be accused of political meddling.
But what of the news outlets? If we hold on the story for confirmation, we can be accused in the same way of “protecting the target” and we allow other news agencies to beat us to the story.
But the danger is much greater, as the Ledger said.
It is chilling to think that Menendez might have lost that election based on an allegation we now know is unfounded. And that’s why prosecutors have to be careful about dropping subpoenas during campaigns.
News outlets need to exhibit the same care — and ask the right questions. Why leak the information now? Who benefits? In the case of the Menendez probe, there remain questions about motivation, especially in the wake of the U.S. Attorney scandal. Should the subpoenas have been reported by the press without confirmation, as it was? Hindsight says no — but only because we know now that there was nothing to them and that Christie has been selective (as the Star-Ledger editorial points out). At the time, they raised legitimate questions about a senate candidate.
My point is that we need to ask better questions and have a stronger, more nuanced sense of the impact of the decisions we make.
So, let’s look at the Esquire scoop — an anonymously sourced story about the feds closing in on Christie allies — through this lens. We might assume that it was just good reporting that ferreted out important information that was absolutely necessary to maintaining the public good — except it offers little to the larger political discussion. We knew Christie and his team were under investigation. We knew there were subpoenas and grand juries in play. None of that has been changed — and none of it justifies anonymity.
This is why the issue of motivation is important here. We are talking about a public, if anonymously sourced, declaration that keeps the scandal in the news as Christie makes the national fundraising rounds in preparation for an apparent White House run. So, maybe, it is politics driving the leak — which some may see as a nice bit of payback for Christie (see Menendez scandal above).
Or, and I think this is the most plausible explanation, the U.S. Attorney’s office may be sending a signal through the press to Christie allies that it is time for each to look out for him or herself, that indictments are coming and, when they do, all deals are off.
In either case, Esquire is being used by its sources. It gets its scoop, though in the larger scheme it is one that lacks much depth, but the sources get a whole lot more.
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