Anonymous sources

Earlier during the Trump presidency, Pew ran a poll that showed that conservatives hold negative views of higher education. Actually, that's not right. I found a discrepancy in one of the first articles I read and checked Pew's website. It turned out that they asked about colleges and universities. Since there are many of us who differentiate between schooling and education, it was downright dishonest for the media to lie about the wording.

Did you read the document that the White House shared about a conversation between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky? According to the media, the memo revealed that Trump changed the subject to the Biden family when asked about aid, and that he referred to an investigation into the Biden family as "a favor." On top of all of that, Trump repeatedly pressed Zelensky to look into the Biden family. Actually, I read the document. It was far from the perfect conversation that Trump claimed, but the media definitely lied about the contents.

Nearly every time I check the validity of statement from the American media, I find errors or outright lies. The checks that I make, however, are somewhat rare. There are several reasons for this. For example, I didn't have time to read through the Mueller report.

Another example could be a recent article from The Atlantic. Anonymous sources insisted that Americans who died in war were losers and suckers. In this particular case, a number of people have responded that they won't trust an article that cites anonymous sources.

I agree with the concerns regarding anonymity. Even if we knew the source, "someone said that Trump said…" is not a very strong statement. The addition of anonymity makes it worse. With the recent history of the American media, there is no way to check the claims from The Atlantic against the source. They could easily misquote, remove important context, or even outright lie. We have absolutely no way of knowing.

Members of the media has defended this tactic by explaining that they don't just accept any anonymous source. I understand that, but that doesn't automatically make their sources credible. Without knowing the source, we can't check it for ourselves. The simple truth is that a story solely reliant on anonymous sources provides absolutely no value.

I was going to let this article slide, but then Melania Trump voiced her opinion. She insisted that it's dangerous to rely on anonymous sources. Then the liberals countered her argument. Numerous replies were made showing that the Trump's insistence that Obama was not born in the U.S. originated from an anonymous source.

Let me summarize this sequence. Melania Trump criticized the use of anonymous sources. Liberals became upset that she dismissed the use of anonymous sources. They countered by criticizing Melania for using an anonymous source herself. This is clearly a source that liberals don't view as credible. Ultimately, Democrats were defending the credibility of anonymous sources by attacking the credibility of anonymous sources.

This definitely ranks among the absurd arguments that have gained widespread acceptance. Are anonymous sources credible or not? Personally, I would say they vary. As long as these sources remain anonymous, there's no way to know. Even if we did, that doesn't prove any specific statement. These stories could be true, but they could also be false. Without any way to check, we might as well just throw away these articles.