Dallas Morning News Policy on Confidential Sources

The following is an excerpt from a February/March 2006 article in the American Journalism Review [1] by AJR managing editor Rachel Smolkin. The article was entitled "Waivering" and can be found here [1].

In the late 1980s, the Dallas Morning News adopted a more stringent policy: Reporters are told to "Mirandize" confidential sources to inform them that their names could be disclosed under unusual circumstances. The policy states: "Unnamed sources must be aware that in rare instances (which, to date, have never occurred at The DMN) they could be identified if lawsuits involving coverage were pursued and efforts to keep them confidential were exhausted in legal disputes (known as 'Mirandizing' a source). Discuss the sources and the situation with your supervising editor before any promise of anonymity is made. Remember that you are not making a personal commitment to the source. You are acting on behalf of the newspaper."

If a source does not agree to being identified in these unlikely instances, "We probably wouldn't use them," says Editor Bob Mong. "In most cases, the sources don't do that. They say, 'Sure. Under those circumstances, if you go to those lengths to protect me, I'm fine with it. I just don't want to be identified now.'..

"There has to be a sense of proportion here – what is the nature of the story? – and look at it case by case by case. But you have to have some kind of bedrock principle out of which you operate," says Mong, who shared the News' policy with then-Time Inc. Editor in Chief Norman Pearlstine after Time turned over Matt Cooper's notes and e-mails to [Special Counsel Patrick] Fitzgerald. "It gets at the importance of negotiating with sources; it gets at the reasonableness of most sources and the seriousness of sources. And those that are committed to getting the story out, I think they understand this..."