Abstract
The paper is an in-depth study of the use of unnamed sources in the reports of two big, international news agencies, The Associated Press (AP) and Reuters. Traditionally, news agencies have referred to issues of “factuality” and “objectivity” as their valued objectives (see e.g. Boyd-Barrett, 1980; van Dijk, 1988), and as one claim to “factuality”, journalists tend to use a wealth of direct and indirect quotes in their reports, often coming from unnamed sources. From the point of view of news rhetoric, presenting an unnamed source as a credible and newsworthy speaker calls for special strategies. Sometimes journalists emphasize that the person quoted does not want to be named, and recently AP, in particular, has resorted more and more to explaining the reasons for anonymity. Though the news agencies themselves seem to think that all the strategies boosting the standing of an unnamed speaker, and the expressions stressing the anonymity, just give necessary information to the reader, it can be argued that they also open a wealth of rhetorical possibilities, and thus can undermine the alleged factuality/objectivity of news agency discourse.
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