---
title: "\"According to Sources Familiar With The Matter\": Anonymous Sources in American Journalism and the Stories That Went Wrong"
description: "Why US news outlets can publish claims from people familiar with the matter: actual malice, shield laws, newsroom rules and the stories that went wrong."
author: Darie Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-11-12T18:09:53.228Z
updated: 2026-11-12T18:16:33.626Z
canonical: https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/according-to-sources-familiar-with-the-matter
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/pexels-a-dramatic-silhouette-of-a-media-crew-with-cameras-capturing-8589617.jpg
categories: Legal, Business
content_type: Editorial
region: United States
publication: Sovereign Magazine
schema_type: Article
---

If you have followed the news about Jensen Huang, you will have read that [he resigned as Nvidia's chief executive on 12 November](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/jensen-huang-resigns-nvidia), a day after the Wall Street Journal said his board was getting ready to oust him. Nvidia gave no reason. Almost everything reported in the weeks before came from "people familiar with the matter", "people briefed on" the intelligence, or "five people who had worked at Nvidia", and none of them was named.

So perhaps you are wondering how a news organization can publish claims like that about the head of a $4 trillion company without saying who made them, and what happens when it gets them wrong. The answer depends partly on the country where it publishes, and partly on rules that newsrooms wrote for themselves after famous stories turned out to be wrong.

## Defamation Laws Around the World

A British publisher printing the same claims about Huang would carry more risk than an American one. Under the Defamation Act 2013 a claimant must show that a statement caused or is likely to cause serious harm to their reputation, and a company must show serious financial loss. The publisher then has to prove the statement was "substantially true" or rely on a public interest defense, which requires it to show it reasonably believed publishing was in the public interest. In Serafin v Malkiewicz in 2020 the UK Supreme Court said that failing to ask the subject for comment does not defeat that defense but counts against the publisher.

English courts also apply what lawyers call the repetition rule. A publisher that repeats someone else's defamatory allegation is treated as if it had made the allegation itself, and it is no defense to show that someone else said it first. The public interest defense can still succeed, and the act protects accurate and impartial accounts of a dispute, but writing "according to the Wall Street Journal" protects a British publisher less than many readers assume.

Section 10 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981 bars courts from ordering a journalist to reveal a source unless disclosure is necessary in the interests of justice or national security or for the prevention of disorder or crime. In 1996 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Britain had breached the right to freedom of expression by fining William Goodwin, a trainee reporter at The Engineer, £5,000 for refusing to name a source, and called the protection of journalistic sources "one of the basic conditions for press freedom".

Canada and Australia, whose law comes from the same English common law, have both added protection for the press in recent years. In 2009 the Supreme Court of Canada created a defense of responsible communication on matters of public interest, which can protect a publisher that cannot prove a statement true if it was diligent in trying to verify it. Since 2017 a Canadian court can order a journalist to name a confidential source only if the information cannot be obtained by any other reasonable means and the public interest in the administration of justice outweighs the interest in keeping the source confidential. Australia's states began adding a serious harm threshold and a public interest defense modeled on Britain's in July 2021. Australian newspapers have also won by proving their reports true. In 2023 a Federal Court judge found that newspaper reports from 2018 that the former soldier Ben Roberts-Smith had committed war crimes, including the murder of unarmed prisoners, were substantially true, and an appeal court upheld the finding in 2025.

In a 2022 report UNESCO counted 160 countries, about 80% of the world's total, where defamation was still a crime. In France the press law of 1881 makes defamation punishable by a fine and lets the publisher prove the facts true, except where they concern private life, and the same law protects the secrecy of journalists' sources. In 2007 Germany's Federal Constitutional Court ruled that searches of the press are unconstitutional when their main purpose is to identify an informant, after police searched the offices of the magazine Cicero. Since August 2025 the European Media Freedom Act has required EU countries to protect journalistic sources and allows spyware to be used against journalists only with a judge's prior approval and in investigations of serious crimes. EU countries had until May 2026 to write into national law a directive against lawsuits brought to silence journalists and campaigners, and in July the European Commission opened proceedings against Ireland and 13 other countries that had not done so.

Back in the United States, where [the reports on Huang](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/nvidia-board-jensen-huang-remove) were published, a public figure who sues a news organization has to prove that it knew a story was false or published it despite serious doubts, a standard the Supreme Court set in 1964 in a case about a newspaper advertisement.

## New York Times v. Sullivan and the Actual Malice Standard

In 1960 the New York Times ran a full-page advertisement, "Heed Their Rising Voices", that raised money for the defense of Martin Luther King Jr. and described the treatment of civil rights protesters in Montgomery, Alabama, with several errors of fact. L.B. Sullivan, the Montgomery city commissioner in charge of the police, sued, and an Alabama jury awarded him $500,000.

On 9 March 1964 the Supreme Court overturned the verdict. It held that a public official cannot recover damages for a defamatory falsehood about his official conduct unless he proves the statement was made "with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not." The court called that standard actual malice. Justice William Brennan, writing for the court, cited a "profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open."

In 1967 the court extended similar protection to public figures who hold no office, and in 1968 it said that reckless disregard requires proof that the publisher "in fact entertained serious doubts as to the truth of his publication." Failing to check a story as thoroughly as a careful reporter would have is not enough on its own.

For a story built on unnamed sources, this means a public figure who sues has to show what the reporters and editors believed about those sources when they published. An anonymous source is no defense in itself. In Harte-Hanks Communications v. Connaughton in 1989, the court upheld a libel verdict against an Ohio newspaper that had chosen not to interview a key witness, ruling that a failure to investigate is not enough on its own but "the purposeful avoidance of the truth is in a different category."

## Shield Laws and the Reporters Who Went to Jail

No federal law protects a reporter's promise to keep a source's name secret. In Branzburg v. Hayes in 1972 the Supreme Court ruled, five votes to four, that the First Amendment does not entitle reporters to refuse a grand jury's questions about their sources, and it has not revisited the question since. Some federal appeals courts recognize a limited privilege in civil cases.

According to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, 40 states and Washington, DC have shield laws, and eight more recognize some protection through their courts, leaving Hawaii and Wyoming with neither. A federal shield bill, the PRESS Act, passed the House of Representatives in January 2024 and was blocked in the Senate that December. It has not become law.

Reporters who refuse a subpoena can be jailed or fined for contempt. Judith Miller of the New York Times spent 85 days in jail in 2005 for refusing to testify in the investigation into the leak of CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity, and was released after her source, Lewis Libby, freed her from her promise. In February 2024 a federal judge held Catherine Herridge, a former Fox News reporter, in contempt and fined her $800 a day for refusing to name the sources of her reporting on Yanping Chen, a scientist who is suing the FBI under the Privacy Act. The fine is on hold while Herridge asks the Supreme Court to hear her case.

News organizations that break their own promise of anonymity can be sued. In 1982 Dan Cohen, who was working for a Republican campaign in Minnesota, gave two newspapers court records about a rival candidate on the promise that he would not be named. The papers named him, and he was fired the same day. A jury awarded him $200,000 in compensatory damages and $500,000 in punitive damages. The punitive award was struck out on appeal, and in Cohen v. Cowles Media in 1991 the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment did not protect the papers from a suit for breaking their promise. The Minnesota Supreme Court reinstated the $200,000 the following year.

## The Editor Behind Every Anonymous Source

At the large American news organizations, at least one editor must know the name of every unnamed source. The Associated Press allows material from an anonymous source only when it is "information and not opinion or speculation, and is vital to the news report," when it is not available any other way, and when the source is reliable and in a position to know. A manager must know who the source is.

Many newsrooms adopted that rule after the case of Janet Cooke. On 28 September 1980 the Post ran her front-page story "Jimmy's World", about an eight-year-old heroin addict in Washington. Milton Coleman, the editor who handled the story, had promised Cooke that her sources would stay confidential and did not ask for the mother's name or the family's address, according to the Post's ombudsman, Bill Green. The paper would not tell the authorities where the boy lived, citing the First Amendment, and in April 1981 the story won a Pulitzer Prize. Within days it emerged that Jimmy did not exist. Cooke resigned, writing that the story was "in essence a fabrication", and the Post returned the prize. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, newspapers began afterward to require reporters to tell an editor who their unnamed sources were.

> ""If, for any reason, you have not received specific approval, the story should be held.""
> — Dean Baquet, then executive editor of the New York Times, in a 2016 memo

That line comes from a March 2016 memo in which Dean Baquet, then executive editor of the New York Times, tightened the paper's rules. Any story whose main point rested entirely on anonymous sources had to be shown in advance to Baquet or one of two other senior editors, and all other anonymous sourcing needed the approval of a department head or deputy. The memo also said that "at least one editor must know the specific identity of any anonymous source before publication." Four months later, Phil Corbett, the editor in charge of the paper's standards, estimated that its use of anonymous sources had fallen by about 30%.

Sources usually ask not to be named because they could lose their jobs or, when the information is classified, face prosecution. The way a news organization describes them is often the only clue a reader gets about how they know what they say. A source described as familiar with the matter could hold almost any job. "Five people who had worked at Nvidia", the New York Times's description of its sources on Huang, is more specific. Washington Post reporters were instructed in the paper's stylebook that "we must strive to tell our readers as much as we can about why our unnamed sources deserve our confidence," according to the paper's ombudsman in 2009. A study of the front pages of the Times and the Post from 1958 to 2008 found that reporters explained why a source was granted anonymity in fewer than 10% of cases until 2008, when the share rose above 25%.

In a [Pew Research Center study](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/06/09/use-of-anonymous-sources-uncommon-in-early-biden-coverage-least-likely-in-outlets-with-right-leaning-audiences/) of coverage of President Biden's first 60 days in office in 2021, 11% of stories used at least one anonymous source and fewer than 1% relied on them alone. In a 2020 Pew survey, 82% of Americans said anonymous sources were acceptable at least in some cases, and 18% said they never were.

## Single-Source Stories at Newsweek, CNN and ABC News

In May 2005 Newsweek reported that a US military investigation had found that interrogators at Guantánamo Bay had flushed a Koran down a toilet. Its only source was an unnamed US government official, who later said he could not be sure his information was correct. Protests followed in Afghanistan and other Muslim countries, in which more than a dozen people were killed. On 16 May the magazine retracted the claim, and the Pentagon said it had "hid behind anonymous sources".

In June 2017 CNN retracted a story that linked Anthony Scaramucci, a Trump ally, to a Senate investigation of a Russian investment fund. The story had a single anonymous source. Three journalists resigned, including Lex Haris, the head of the network's investigative unit.

On 1 December 2017 Brian Ross of ABC News reported that Donald Trump, as a candidate, had directed Michael Flynn to make contact with Russian officials. The report had a single source. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell about 350 points during the day before recovering most of the loss and closing 41 points lower. ABC clarified the report that evening and later corrected it, saying its source had placed the instruction during the transition, after Trump had won the election. Ross was suspended for four weeks without pay, and ABC said the report "had not been fully vetted through our editorial standards process."

## The Government Sources Behind the Jewell, Lee and Hatfill Stories

In July 1996 the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Richard Jewell, the security guard who had found the bomb in Centennial Olympic Park, was the focus of the FBI's investigation, information that came from a law enforcement leak. Jewell was cleared that October, and Eric Rudolph later pleaded guilty to the bombing. NBC paid Jewell more than $500,000 to settle his claim, according to reports at the time, and CNN also settled. His suit against the Journal-Constitution, continued by his estate after he passed away in 2007, was dismissed in 2011, when a Georgia appeals court found that the paper's reporting had been substantially true when it was published, because the FBI was treating him as a suspect.

In 1999 the New York Times and other outlets reported, citing officials, that investigators suspected Wen Ho Lee, a scientist at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory, of passing secrets to China. Lee spent nine months in solitary confinement, was never charged with espionage, and in 2000 pleaded guilty to one count of mishandling computer files. In 2006 the government paid him $895,000, and five news organizations, including the Times, paid him $750,000 between them to end contempt proceedings against five reporters who would not name the officials who had leaked information about him.

In 2002 Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times columnist, wrote columns criticizing the FBI's handling of the 2001 anthrax letter attacks and pointing to a scientist he called "Mr. Z". Steven Hatfill identified himself as Mr. Z that August, and the government publicly called him a "person of interest". Hatfill was never charged, and in 2008 the investigation turned to another army scientist, Bruce Ivins, who took his own life that July as prosecutors prepared to charge him. Hatfill sued the Times and lost, after the courts found that he was a public figure for the purposes of the case and had not shown actual malice. He also sued the government, claiming officials had leaked information about him. In that suit Toni Locy, a former USA Today reporter, was held in contempt for refusing to name her sources, and in June 2008 the government settled with Hatfill for $5.82 million without admitting liability.

## Rolling Stone and the Actual Malice Verdict

In November 2014 Rolling Stone published "A Rape on Campus", which described a gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity on the account of one student, identified only as Jackie. A review by the Columbia Journalism School, released in April 2015, found that the reporter had not contacted the men accused, at Jackie's request, and had not tried to identify the three friends she said she spoke to that night. It called the story "a journalistic failure that was avoidable", and Rolling Stone retracted it.

In November 2016 a federal jury found that the magazine had acted with actual malice toward Nicole Eramo, a university dean portrayed in the story, and awarded her $3 million. A third of that was for republishing the article on 5 December 2014, with a note from the editor, after doubts about it had become public. Eramo later settled with the magazine, and the fraternity settled its own suit for $1.65 million.

## The Big Hack and Anonymous Reports That Move Share Prices

On 4 October 2018 Bloomberg Businessweek reported that a unit of China's People's Liberation Army had planted tiny chips on server motherboards made by Super Micro Computer and used by companies including Apple and Amazon. Bloomberg cited 17 unnamed sources. Apple said it "has never found malicious chips, 'hardware manipulations' or vulnerabilities purposely planted in any server," Amazon and Super Micro also denied the report, and Rob Joyce, a senior official at the National Security Agency, said he could not find "any ties to the claims that are in the article." Super Micro's shares closed 41% lower that day, after falling as much as 60%. Bloomberg stood by the story and in 2021 published a follow-up citing more than 50 sources, most of them unnamed. Super Micro called it "a mishmash of disparate and inaccurate allegations".

Research on takeover rumors suggests that prices move on such reports whether or not they prove accurate. Kenneth Ahern and Denis Sosyura studied more than 500 takeover rumors about some 350 companies reported in the press between 2000 and 2011, in research published in the Review of Financial Studies in 2015. Target shares rose on accurate and inaccurate rumors alike, and shares of the targets of inaccurate rumors later fell back further. Rumors reported by experienced journalists were more often accurate, and hedged wording and missing detail were signs of rumors that did not come true.

## Watergate and Theranos, Where Anonymous Sources Held Up

The best-known anonymous source in American journalism was the FBI's second most senior official. Mark Felt guided Bob Woodward of the Washington Post during the Watergate reporting of 1972 to 1974 under the name Deep Throat, and his identity stayed secret until Vanity Fair published an article on 31 May 2005 in which he said, "I'm the guy they used to call 'Deep Throat.'" The Post confirmed it the same day.

In October 2015 John Carreyrou of the Wall Street Journal reported that [Theranos, the blood-testing company founded by Elizabeth Holmes](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/elizabeth-holmes-theranos-scandal-has-more-to-it-than-just-toxic-silicon-valley-culture), ran only about a dozen of its tests on its own technology. His sources included former employees who were not named. Before publication Theranos sent a delegation of seven people, four of them lawyers, to a five-hour meeting with the paper, and Carreyrou told the Journal's lawyer that attorneys from David Boies's firm were "threatening and harassing the whistleblower". Holmes testified in 2021 that she had emailed Rupert Murdoch, whose company owns the Journal, about the story because she wanted him "in the loop". In January 2022 a jury convicted her of defrauding investors, and she was sentenced to 11 years and three months in prison.

## Pressure on Sullivan and on Reporters

Two Supreme Court justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, have argued that the court should reconsider actual malice, Thomas since 2019 and Gorsuch since 2021. The court has declined recent requests to do so, including Steve Wynn's petition in his case against the Associated Press in March 2025 and Alan Dershowitz's in his case against CNN in June 2026, when only Thomas and Gorsuch would have heard it.

On 31 October a federal judge in Florida dismissed for good President Trump's $10 billion suit against Dow Jones, the Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch over the paper's report on a birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein, writing that the amended complaint "falls short of pleading actual malice." Trump has appealed. On 10 November another federal judge allowed his suit against the BBC to go forward, and his $15 billion suit against the New York Times and Penguin Random House is still pending.

In April 2025 Attorney General Pam Bondi rescinded the stricter limits her predecessor, Merrick Garland, had placed on subpoenaing journalists in leak investigations. In January 2026 FBI agents searched the home of Hannah Natanson, a Washington Post reporter, and seized her devices. A magistrate judge ruled in February that the court would review the devices in place of the Justice Department, and a district judge upheld that ruling in May. In June the department issued and then withdrew subpoenas seeking grand jury testimony from reporters at the Post and the Journal, and in July it dropped subpoenas to New York Times journalists after sharp questioning from a federal judge.

## Reading a Story Built on Unnamed Sources

In Pew's 2020 survey, 68% of Americans said the use of an anonymous source affected how much they believed a story, at least somewhat. The next time you read that something happened according to people familiar with the matter, start with how the report describes those people. A former employee, a sitting director and an official briefed on intelligence are very different sources, and a careful report says which kind it is relying on and, where it can, why they would not be named. The News Literacy Project, a US nonprofit that teaches people to judge the news, advises readers to look for that explanation and to ask whether a source's motives could undermine what they said.

Then look at the responses. A detailed denial on the record carries more weight than "declined to comment", and when other outlets confirm a report through their own sources, more than one set of people stands behind it. In the research on takeover rumors, hedged wording and missing detail were the marks of reports that did not come true.

Mark Felt kept his role as Deep Throat secret for more than 30 years, and the people behind the reports on Huang may never be named. Until they are, readers have to go on how the reports describe them and on the record of the news organizations that published them.

## FAQ

**Q: Do journalists have to reveal their sources?**
Only when a court orders it, and some refuse even then. In the US no federal law protects a reporter who refuses a subpoena, and in Branzburg v. Hayes in 1972 the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment does not cover questions from a grand jury. Forty states and Washington, DC have shield laws, and eight more give some protection through their courts. Reporters who defy a court order can be jailed or fined, as Judith Miller was in 2005 and Catherine Herridge was in 2024. In Britain, section 10 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981 protects sources unless a court finds that disclosure is necessary for justice, national security or the prevention of disorder or crime.

**Q: Are anonymous sources credible?**
That depends on the source and on the checks behind the story. At the large US news organizations an editor must know who an unnamed source is, the Associated Press requires that the source be reliable and in a position to know, and the New York Times requires senior approval for stories that rest on anonymous sources. The record includes stories that held up, such as Watergate and the Journal's Theranos reporting, and stories that were retracted or corrected, such as Newsweek's Koran report and ABC's Flynn report. A precise description of the source, on-record confirmation and independent reporting by other outlets make a claim more credible.

**Q: Is actual malice hard to prove?**
Yes. A public figure must show that the publisher knew a statement was false or published it despite serious doubts about its truth, which means proving what the reporters and editors believed at the time. Careless reporting is not enough on its own. Rolling Stone is one of the publishers against which a jury found it, awarding a university dean $3 million in 2016 over "A Rape on Campus". In October 2026 a judge dismissed Donald Trump's suit against the Wall Street Journal because his lawyers had not pleaded actual malice.