Sources, readers, editors — hate ‘em all

By Lance Carbunkle
Howlin’ Leroy Eenk Staff

WASHINGTON — I hear it almost every day.

“I don’t want my name in the paper.”

They are talking to a reporter, they really want to give their side, make their point and be understood. They’re not politicians or cops, they’re just people, normal people, witnesses and victims. It’s important to them that the reporter understand, and they are never shy about dishing ten minutes of scatter-brained background complete with heavy digressions.

You can tell, they want to talk about it, they want to be understood. It makes them feel good, important. They are “incited to discourse,” as Focault might say if he were alive and OK with me quoting him.

“Can I get you to spell your name?” I say, readying the pen. I’m no amateur, I learned long ago, you cannot misspell people’s names. After I write down their first name, I show it to them on the page. I do the same with the last name.

“Accuracy is paramount,” my first desk editor wrote me in an e-mail after catching an error.

I also learned long ago not to ask for their name, nor ask if I can quote them.

I ask them to spell it.

“Oh, I don’t want my name in the paper.”

“OK, that’s fine, but I can’t put any information in the paper without a name attached to it. So I won’t be able to use anything you told me.”

They give me a strange look. They are Americans, lived in this country their whole lives, adults, and they still don’t know how newspapers work.

“Can’t you just say it, or say ‘anonymous source?’”

“I can’t use anything without a name,” I say, and start glancing over their shoulder, thinking to myself, like a zombie: names, names, naaammesss.

They look conflicted, but not for long. “Naw, I don’t want to be in the paper.” It’s more important to say it, to have somebody official-looking believe them, than to stand by what they say. They aren’t a politician, they don’t have anything at stake.

It happens with politicians and other official sources too. They love to go off the record. “Don’t put that in the paper,” they say. It’s usually something meaningless.

But unlike the civilian, I know the politician’s name.

Not that politicians aren’t more obnoxious than unofficial sources. They are. If you burn a politician, however, you’ll find your calls not getting returned and your editors will get even more annoying.

People don’t mean what they say, but they must say it.