A reader, Dale Kelberman of Annapolis, Md., emails with what I like to call a Perfectly Reasonable Question.He writes:

In your April 30th article, you pointed out your support for James Risen and his claim for a reporter’s privilege, while in the very next paragraph, you bemoaned the continued and pervasive use by the NYT of anonymous sources for the flimsiest of reasons. I was under the impression that the Times’s, and your, support for the reporter’s privilege was based on the notion that sources would dry up if reporters did not have the ability to protect them, thereby “chilling” the First Amendment. Yet as your Anonywatch column demonstrates, that is not the case at all. Notwithstanding the government’s prosecution of Edward Snowden, its pursuit of James Risen as a witness, its subpoenas to the AP, etc., and numerous other instances of this type, reporters seem to have no trouble finding “sources” willing to talk about anything and everything, from insider trading investigations to classified briefings on State Department policy, among others. It would be of interest to your readers to explain these seemingly inconsistent positions. Thanks.

From my point of view, there is no conflict between these positions – but I can certainly understand why it might seem that way.

Here’s my thinking: On sensitive stories, especially those involving national security, it’s often impossible to quote or attribute sources by name. That has been the case with a great deal of Mr. Risen’s work. He is a Washington-based investigative reporter, concentrating on national security. The case for which he is being put through legal hell has to do with his book, “State of War,” in which he reported on a C.I.A. program to sabotage Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons. Judge Roger Gregory, in a dissenting opinion for the federal Court of Appeals, made the point that this reporting was far from extraneous: “Quite the opposite, it portends to inform the reader of a blundered American intelligence mission in Iran.” And given the press’s failure to adequately scrutinize United States intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, the judge wrote, “it is hard to imagine many subjects more deserving of public scrutiny and debate.”

Much of Mr. Risen’s other reporting – including the well-known electronic eavesdropping story for which he and Eric Lichtblau won a Pulitzer Prize — could never have been written without confidential sources. And once confidentiality is agreed upon, it must be honored – which is exactly what Mr. Risen is doing by refusing to testify in court.

It is true, and worrisome, that the government’s pursuit of journalists has created a chilling effect for those courageous sources – let’s call them whistle-blowers here — who might otherwise want to tell journalists about government abuses or let them know what their elected representatives are doing in secret. They matter a great deal in this era in which far too much government information has become classified.

This serious and valid use of confidentiality is a far cry from the gratuitous use of anonymous sources for what Mr. Kelberman rightly describes as “the flimsiest of reasons.”

These sources will never feel that chill. That’s because they know they’ll never be prosecuted for purveying what is often, in essence, officially approved government communication, or for promoting their own political agenda.

There’s at least one other category of anonymous sources – those on nongovernment stories that have no important news value. Democracy is not going to suffer if these go away.

It’s these latter two categories that I, and many Times readers, find objectionable. (And there’s a legitimate argument about where to draw the line when something obtained through anonymity is newsworthy but not crucial to the functioning of the democracy.)

The Times’s policy – if not always its practice — has it right: It says that anonymity should be granted sparingly and as a last resort. When such sources are used, it should be for something that really matters.