NEW YORK — The coup of publishing a column by an anonymous Trump administration official bashing the boss could backfire on The New York Times if the author is unmasked and turns out to be a little-known person, or if the newspaper’s own reporters solve the puzzle.
Within hours of the essay appearing on the paper’s website, the mystery of the writer’s identity began to rival the Watergate-era hunt for “Deep Throat” in Washington, and a parade of Trump team members issued statements Thursday saying, in effect, “it’s not me.”
The Times’ only clue was calling the author a “senior administration official.” James Dao, the newspaper’s op-ed editor, said in the Times’ daily podcast that while an intermediary brought him together with the author, he conducted a background check and spoke to the person to the point that he was “totally confident” in the identity.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, communications professor and director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said the column attracted so much attention - as much for its existence as for what it actually said - that it raised the expectation that the author is someone powerful, she said.
If the person is not among the 20 top people in the administration, “the Times just gets creamed,” said Tom Bettag, a veteran news producer and now a University of Maryland journalism instructor. “And I think it gets held against them in the biggest possible way. I have enough respect for the Times to believe that they wouldn’t hold themselves up to that.”
It would look like the Times was trying to stir the pot if it were not a high-level person, said Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
The newspaper maintains a strict policy of separation between its news and opinion side, and the decision to publish the column without identifying the author was made by Dao and his boss, Editorial Page Editor James Bennet, in consultation with Publisher A.G. Sulzberger. The paper’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, is responsible for the news side and was not part of the decision.
Few people at the paper know the writer’s identity, Dao said, and he could not see any circumstances under which it would be divulged.
The Times’ own news story about the column said the author’s identity is “known to the Times’ editorial page department but not to the reporters who cover the White House.”
Like hundreds of other reporters in Washington, the Times’ news staff is trying to find out the writer’s name. If the Times learns the identity, it could raise serious questions about the newspaper’s ability to protect a confidential source among people who don’t know - or don’t believe - that one part of the newspaper will keep important information away from another.
“You could write a novel about this,” said Jamieson, author of the upcoming “Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President.” ’’If they engage in successful journalism, at some level they discredit themselves.”
News organizations have different standards for using information from unnamed sources. Frequently, they try to give some indication of why the person would be in a position to know something - the senior administration official, for example - and why anonymity was granted. In this case, the newspaper considered that the person’s job would clearly be at risk and that the person could even be physically threatened, Dao said.
He did not see much difference in the use of anonymity in news and opinion pages.
The Times has long been a target of President Donald Trump’s vitriol. He criticized the newspaper for printing the column and said the Times should reveal its source for reasons of national security.
“There’s nothing in the piece that strikes me as being relevant to or undermining the national security,” Dao said.
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