Watching a "Frontline" special on PBS the other evening, I started to feel my blood begin to boil.

The television program was a look at the current perjury trial of "Scooter" Libby, a marching soldier in the Bush administration. Libby is charged with lying to a grand jury about how the name of a CIA agent ended up in the public fishbowl that passes for national news these days.

The issue that raised my blood pressure was the use of confidential sources. In the nation's capital, probably the last 15 years or so, the use of confidential or unnamed sources has become commonplace.

Those who use them claim it's the only way that they can break the big, important stories. When reporting in Washington, confidential sources spill all to reporters -- knowing that they have the protection of anonymity.

I disagree strongly with that approach. To me, it is sloppy, lazy and spin-driven journalism. It doesn't help the public, whose individuals really don't know the motivations that drive these cloak-and-dagger news releases. It also does not help the journalists to learn how to really report the news -- researching the information and then confronting the source with that information for a simple confirmation or denial.

"All The President's Men" -- chronicling the Washington Post's fine and courageous reporting that took down President Richard Nixon -- and the so-called "Watergate-age" of reporting when I was just out of school, in the end, really didn't do journalists any favors. They have learned to lean on confidential source reporting, and through that process, become as entwined with the sources they report on as one of those spiral DNA molecules.

I speak from personal experience.

Years ago, when I was cutting my teeth in this business, working as a police reporter at a daily newspaper in West Virginia, a rumor surfaced that the deputy at the county jail wasn't running such a tight ship.

Since he was black and the sheriff was white, my competitor wrote several stories that the sheriff was a racist and that the deputy was being discriminated against.

I did not. There weren't any facts to justify such a story.

Then, the sheriff fired the jail deputy. More stories from my competitor about the racism rampant in the sheriff's department. I continued to ignore that part of the story.

In a twist, the sheriff reinstated the deputy, then fired him again -- this time sending him a confidential letter outlining what he had done. It turned out that he hadn't fired him correctly the first time, and, just before the deputy's civil service hearing was to start, the deputy was reinstated.

He was fired the following day.

My competitor was told by the deputy to hold off on printing the letter, which the deputy gladly gave to the reporter. The reporter sat on the story, waiting for his source to give him the green light to print the information. He felt an allegiance to the deputy.

I felt no similar allegiance.

I was told by members of the sheriff's department that, I, too, could obtain a copy of the confidential letter, that someone could leave a copy of the letter on a desk somewhere for me.

I said it shouldn't work that way.

I insisted that some leader of the sheriff's department -- in the interest of full and balanced disclosure -- should make the decision to release the letter to the newspaper. Public policy has accountability and I wanted to see the sheriff's department become accountable in this give-and-take battle between the sheriff and the deputy in charge of the jail.

Within hours, the sheriff's department's chief deputy came to the newspaper office in Beckley, W.Va., and handed my boss' boss a copy of the confidential letter that the jail deputy had received.

We ran a story, without my by-line, of what the letter said.

The deputy, among other transgressions, allowed marijuana into the jail and did other things that compromised the safety of the community because of the way he ran the jail. Anyone knowing all the facts could see this was a case of poor and shoddy job performance, not racism.

My competitor was aghast. His source had controlled the story and that control contributed to the overall disservice to his readers.

People need to know what's going on in their world but at the same time, reporters need to report, not be spun around by their sources.

That's what happened in Washington with the "Scooter" Libby mess. I would like to see less, not more, use of confidential sources, a judicious use that would balance the needs between public accountability -- by those we elect and those who work for people we elect -- versus the important need to know.

I think we let the politicians and their underlings off the hook when everything is driven by disclosures of confidential information. Those disclosures are by those individuals who want to sling the arrows in the dark and not be held accountable for their public policy decisions.

Mason is the editor of The Marshall Democrat-News. Spectrum appears every other Friday.

Contact Chuck Mason at

marshalleditor@socket.net