Lieutenant Colonel Robert L. Bateman is currently stationed in Washington, D.C. He was a Military Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and has authored two books: "Digital War, A View from the Front Lines" (Presidio: 1999) and "No Gun Ri, A Military History of the Korean War Incident" (Stackpole, 2002). These opinions are his own and do not reflect those of the U.S. Government or the Armed Forces.

As an historian it is both amusing and distressing to note how often the same themes appear time after time.  In the 1920s the newspapers were awash with stories about the failure of the public education system.  American children, it seems, were geographically challenged and could rarely identify major nation states on the map, not to mention their problems with the language of Shakespeare.  In the 1950s we saw this again as people worried and wriggled, and sent Why Johnny Can’t Read to the top of the bestseller lists in 1955.  Capitalizing on this American inclination, Why Johnny STILL Can’t Read came out in 1987 and scared the bejesus out of another generation.  Indeed, it appears that the American educational system has failed more times than Dick Cheney’s heart.  One sees similar phenomena occurring with (pick your favorites):  American diplomacy, American business, the American family, marriage, and of course, journalism.  Indeed, as I myself straddle the lines between two fields I can tell you as an observer both inside and outside journalism, that you people are freakin’ obsessed with the impending doom of journalism.

Unfortunately, this time you might be closer to right than wrong.  Traditional journalism, by which I mean print journalism, might be nearing the end of a pretty good run unless you do something about it now.  The actual end will not come for another twenty years, at least, but your problem is not so much external as it is internal.  It resides in the culture of practical journalism, despite the best efforts of your academic pipeline.  Since the trouble is cultural, and changing a culture is about as rapid as turning an aircraft carrier with a canoe paddle, it is appropriate to raise the issue now.  The trouble is anonymity.

I live in Washington, DC, literally on top of Capitol Hill, and so I am the first to admit that there is a certain utility to the anonymous quote. Ah hell, who am I kidding?  There is a huge amount of utility.  Allowing people to become anonymous sources makes research a hell of a lot faster.  Easier too.  You do not need to spend hours on the phone or in person trying to talk a recalcitrant source into going “on the record.”  Nope, you know the rules, and so do they.  And with a flicker of magic journalism dust you transform the anonymous-to-all-but-his-mom-anyway junior staffer from the office of Congressman Whatshisnameanyway from Ohio into, “one Capitol Hill source close to the legislation issue said.”  Besides, that sounds so much more impressive than, “Thomas Kent, 23, the mail-opener in the office of Congressman…”

I have seen it myself. Some years back, during my first tour of duty here in Washington, just after 9/11, a pretty famous reporter from one of the major newspapers met me for lunch.  So far as I knew, we were going to talk about history.  I am, after all, also a historian. We had come to know each other casually over the preceding couple of years via e-mail, and now that I was in DC his invitation to finally meet face-to-face was just fine.  I believe we were about twenty minutes into our meal when I realized that when he was asking my opinions on this, that, or the other thing, he was actually pumping me for information.  I laid it on the table.  “Look ____, I like you.  But I really can’t talk about my day job.  OK?”  Then he made the offer.

 “OK, so, well, what if I don’t use your name, but I identify you as, ‘A military strategist, stationed in the Pentagon’?”

“No.”

“Alright, ahhh, how about ‘a professional infantryman with extensive field experience’?”

“Seriously, no.”

“OK then, what about if I tell you something and you just give me your informed opinion as a historian.”

“Are you going to ask me a question about history, or about the present?”

 “The present.”

“No.”

Now what is really ludicrous about this exchange was that this journalist (who is, I should note, still my friend, particularly since we laid down some ground rules) wanted to use me as a source at all.  At the time I was a pissant little brand-spanking-new major, which in the Pentagon pretty much qualifies you to make the coffee.  I really did not have anything to conceal at that time, particularly since I had only just weeks earlier left my last position, which was on the faculty of the Department of History at West Point.  There are not a lot of secrets in Thucydides.

I now realize that what he needed was somebody to pad his article.  He already had information, some of it very solid, and he knew what the story was going to look like.  But in the immediate wake of 9/11, none of his normal sources would even come close to giving him something for attribution, and so he was forced to turn to newcomers like me, to serve as anonymous stand-ins for his previous anonymous sources.  Folks, that is not right.

But the use of anonymous sources to pad a story, or to make it appear like your sources are more substantial than they actually are, or to make it easier and faster to write your stories is not the reason why they will cause the downfall of print journalism.  The reason is a combination of anonymous sources, Moore’s Law, and the internet.  Basically it breaks down this way:  Every year more and more information becomes available via the internet.  That is a given.  But what many people do not take the time to notice, or perhaps cannot notice because of the scale of the issue, is that the information openly available is growing exponentially.  We are just individually too small to see it.  But the computers we use to process and transmit that information are not.  Computers have no sense of self, no sense of scale, and their “intelligence” (at least their ability to process information) doubles every 18 months.

Already we have computers which can readily accomplish comparative text analysis of tens of thousands of pages of materials and group those pages according to the three, or ten, or hundred different authors who wrote them, all in a few seconds.  They do not know who the authors are, but they can match their writing styles if given more than a few pages of examples from each person.  Similarly, “knowledge trees” and “social networks” will likely soon merge, making it possible to know who could possibly know what, about just about anything.  When that happens, and is inevitably combined with the processing power which identifies people by their very syntax, anonymity will go out the door.

For the Republic this, I contend, is a good thing.  Knowing that you are responsible for your words is something that our culture has partially lost since the beginning of the Age of the Internet.  Having political types called to account for their “anonymous” slandering of an opponent would be one benefit.  Uncovering corporate shenanigans would be another.  But because blogging (and whatever follows it) is likely here to stay, that rather leaves journalists out on a very thin limb.  Much of the authority upon which current journalism is based is dependent upon the idea that journalists can dig deeper, and have better sources than anyone else.  It is an idea unconsciously buttressed by the widespread use of anonymous sources and the attendant de facto padding of stories with credible sources.  In order to retain that credibility the culture of the newsroom needs to start changing now, kicking the habit of anonymity and developing new tools of their own to maintain the position as arbiters of what is important.

You can write to LTC Bob at R_Bateman_LTC@hotmail.com.