British journalists rely too heavily on anonymous sources, often serving as little more than a covert mouthpiece for Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a No. 10 source boasted to POLITICO.

Actually, a No. 10 source didn't say that. And POLITICO doesn’t allow reporters to use the word “source” to describe people they are quoting anonymously.

But there is a growing backlash in the U.K. against the use of off-record sources in political journalism — which is reflected in debate about journalistic transparency across the Continent (more of that below).

Those in favor of greater transparency argue that readers of mainstream U.K. news outlets are very much at the mercy of journalists who routinely cite such “sources,” and provide information — half-truths and spin — that is equally unreliable.

According to Peter Oborne — formerly chief political commentator at the Telegraph and Daily Mail columnist — Westminster bubble journalists too often allow government actors to be identified only vaguely as "a Number 10 source." This facilitates a government "fake news machine" by allowing Johnson's team to float damaging attack lines against opponents, he argues, while making it impossible to hold ministers accountable for such attacks.

The less readers know about the source of information in political stories, the harder it is for them to evaluate the content.

Oborne's take-down of what he calls "client journalism" crystalized a national debate about media sourcing that has now broken out of the chin-stroking circles of journalism master's degree courses and into the mainstream. Newspaper cartoonists, for example, have taken to skewering the anonymous source as a figure of fun. The FT's Banx last week depicted a vicar addressing his congregation with the words: "And a source said, 'let there be light.'" The New Yorker's cartoonist Barbara Smaller depicted the "unnamed source" as a spooky Halloween character.

But jokes aside, this matters.

The less readers know about the source of information in political stories, the harder it is for them to evaluate the content. So where possible, journalists should resist demands from sources to obscure where information or quotes come from.

There's also a broader point about democracy. "This way of operating does the public a big disservice — it allows Downing Street to get its message out without having to take responsibility for it," said Jill Rutter, a former director of communications at the U.K. Treasury.

But that's easier said than done. Political spinners have always whispered their side of the story to friendly hacks and the price for information is often the terms under which a journalist can use it. The judgment call for media is over what serves the reader best: to share the information or to leave it out of a story because of opaque sourcing.

As ITV Political Editor Robert Peston put it in a response to Oborne: "In politics, democracy is served when we know how those in power think and speak. My job is to draw back the veil as far as I can, so that citizens can judge them," he wrote. The key phrase: "...as far as I can."

Political journalists wrestle with this dilemma every day.

At POLITICO we regularly quote sources anonymously, although we strive for as full a description of the person behind the quote as possible — an "EU27 diplomat," a "Downing Street official," or "senior minister," rather than just a "source." And when we do use information from such sources, we aim to triangulate the information from multiple different people. Read our coverage of the Brexit talks, for example, and you will often find three, four, five or more diplomats, politicians and officials quoted.

It isn't full transparency, but it is better than the alternative. Without using anonymous sources, very often there would be no story — or at least not one worth writing.

Across Europe, journalists are wrestling with many of the same issues, but within very different national journalistic cultures. The rules of engagement between reporters and politicians differ, sometimes wildly, from country to country. Here is POLITICO's tour around the rules of the different political jungles of Europe and beyond:

Brussels

One of the eye-opening curiosities for new correspondents posted in Brussels is how many people are paid salaries to speak on behalf of the EU whose names are rarely if ever supposed to appear in print, including a legion of press attaches who work in the European Commission spokesperson’s service.

In the EU capital, “off-record” means not for attribution, while “on background” means not for publication at all, but solely for a reporter’s edification.

There are exceptions to the no-name rule, notably when the chief spokesperson and his or her team speak on camera at the Commission’s daily midday news conference. The announcements and answers to questions at the midday are always on the record and attributable. It would be silly otherwise since the midday is broadcast live, and available for replay.

The diplomats who speak for the EU member countries also often prefer anonymity as a matter of routine — especially when discussing the various meetings of formations of the Council of the European Union, or of diplomat meetings known as Coreper 1 or Coreper 2 depending on the topic.

Salaried staff of the EU institutions — the Commission, Council or Parliament — are “EU officials” while the staff of the permanent representations of EU member countries are “EU diplomats” or “ambassadors” for those who have the rank and are willing.

The office of the European Council president typically prefers to let the country holding the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union speak for the collective 28 member states. So the president’s staff, unless answering a query directly about the president, generally insist on being called "EU officials."

The general preference for anonymity is highly annoying to journalists who prefer to cite sources by name. That increases the authority of the reporting for readers who are rightly skeptical and find it hard to judge the weight of a comment without a name being put to it.

The anonymity also serves to perpetuate the stereotype of Brussels as a city filled with faceless, unelected bureaucrats. Many of these anonymous voices are highly talented, exceedingly professional civil servants who know their briefs well, and dedicate their lives to the public good.

But alas the culture is hard to break. And those anonymous spokespersons, if named in violation of the unwritten code of conduct, have been known to exact revenge. The offending journalist or even an entire outlet risks punishment by being excluded from future briefings or embargoed press announcements.

— David Herszenhorn

Germany

Like most things German, the practice of quoting public officials and politicians is strictly regimented. Germany has a three-tiered system for attribution: unter eins (on the record), unter zwei (on background, meaning the information can be used without directly quoting the source), and unter drei (entirely off the record).

In practice, almost nothing newsworthy is said unter eins. When politicians have a message to send they will typically gather a small group of trusted journalists for an unter drei briefing. Even when they can't quote sources directly, German journalists have a way of getting unter drei information into the public realm.

German politicians are so worried of making a gaffe that they even insist on approving on-the-record quotes, a process they call "authorization." Unheard of in the Anglo-American sphere, authorization is a circuitous process that prevents a publication from printing an interview with a politician until the subject of the interview has given their approval.

Political operatives argue that the process ensures journalists don't "take things out of context." But it's also a way for politicians to censor juicy (read: honest) quotes. As a result, print interviews with German politicians tend to read like the canned statements they are.

— Matthew Karnitschnig

Sweden

Sweden’s consensus-based politics sometimes makes it hard for journalists to land a kioskvältare — a story that’s so good, the newspaper kiosk will be knocked over in the rush for copies.

Even during last year’s 134-day post-election deadlock, politicians behaved so well by everyone-else-but-Sweden’s standards that Riksdag speaker Andreas Norlén confessed he felt a certain envy for Westminster’s John Bercow. Swedish politicians are held to pretty high standards of behavior, as one high-flying politician found out in 1995 when she was raked over the coals for buying groceries with her official credit card, in what became known as the “Toblerone Affair.”

As you’d expect, there is also a high level of transparency in dealings between the media and elected officials: Access to members of parliament, ministers and even the prime minister is relatively easy and almost always on the record, they are generally identified by name, and even more unusually, foreign media are granted almost the same level of access, in my experience.

One drawback for reporters in Sweden, however, is that it is customary, like in Germany, for interviewees to ask for — and get — approval of quotes before publication. Interestingly, this is not seen as a bad thing by all Swedish journalists, some of whom argue that it is consistent with the Swedish model of “open” society.

— Stephen Brown

Italy

Just as elsewhere, Italian newspapers are full of behind-the-scenes stories based on off-the-record quotes — political journalism would be impossible without them — but the problem is compounded by the common use of impersonal grammatical forms such as “si dice” or “one says." In other cases there is no description of the speaker at all, whether it is an official, a diplomat, a banker, a prosecutor or someone else: It’s just “a source.”

What is more peculiar to Italy is what happens with on-the-record quotes. For the Italian media the words in between the quote marks are not necessarily a verbatim account of what was said, but a version that — in the journalist's view — better reflects the meaning.

A high-profile example dates to March last year, when one of the country’s most distinguished journalists, Eugenio Scalfari, founder of La Repubblica, the most important left-leaning daily, interviewed the pope.

After publication, the Vatican objected to what they described as a “reconstruction” of the interview, not a verbatim account of the conversation. They complained that “the actual words pronounced by the Pope were not quoted” and no quote in the story “must be considered as an accurate transcript of the Holy Father’s words.” At issue was that in Scalfari's article the pope appeared to cast doubt on the existence of hell, something the Vatican insisted he had never said.

Scalfari, 95, admitted he had not recorded the interview, but instead had relied on his memory. He said the quotes had been green-lighted by the pope’s secretary.

— Jacopo Barigazzi

Poland

In most countries politicians have to be careful when talking to journalists — in Poland it’s the other way around. Thanks to an “authorization” law dating back to 1984 and communist times, people being interviewed have the legal right to check their quotes before publication. Reporters who don’t follow that rule risk a fine.

The practice makes it almost inevitable that interviewees will use the opportunity to tweak their responses. Most of the foreign press resists that pressure, but it’s prevalent in Polish publications. I saw a good example of that need to tinker when I was the Financial Times’ Central Europe correspondent.

I landed an interview with the new central bank governor, Sławomir Skrzypek, in 2007. He wasn’t much of an expert on financial matters, and he was very nervous during the interview. I could tell he was making mistakes as we chatted. His staff stepped in after the interview and insisted on the right of authorization — something that violated FT policy.

As a courtesy, I sent along the transcript of the interview. A couple of weeks later it came back — completely rewritten. We didn’t use those changed quotes.

— Jan Cienski

France

On-the-record quotes are rare in France. At all levels of government, politicians and officials are generally highly averse to being cited by name. Even Cabinet members sometimes request anonymity, not just their advisers.

Part of it is a question of message control: Talking points are decided in a centralized and top-down manner, and any diversion away from the central line is not only frowned upon, but can be punished. And the ground rules of political reporting have been this way for a long time and are well entrenched.

Refusing anonymity is always an option for reporters, but it means limiting ourselves to well-rehearsed talking points by members of government authorized and trained to deliver them — and at the time that best fits the government’s agenda. It also lets entire swaths of the political machine off the hook, where the most valuable, unrehearsed insight lies. It is only by speaking to those people candidly — and describing them as best we can without revealing their identities — that it is possible to find out what is really going on within government.

It is also established practice in France for quotes from on-the-record interviews to be revised and approved prior to publication by not only politicians but academics and think tankers as well. Nevertheless, the practice applies much more to French media than it does to the anglophone publications reporting on France. Some of it can be quite egregious, with entire quotes completely rewritten, though it is mostly used to ensure accuracy.

The practice hasn’t gone unchallenged in the domestic press. In January 2018, a local paper in the north of France called La Voix du Nord decided to stop sending interview transcripts for approval before publication. To explain the move, the paper's Editor-in-chief Patrick Jankielewicz wrote that “the spontaneity of [interview] responses is an important element. What is the point of publishing polished, smoothed out, sanitized, responses by PR advisers?”

— Rym Momtaz

United States

Washington may be the home of the original “Deep Throat” but few anonymous sources rise to that level of fame or end up worthy of a nickname. They are just officials of some sort or another.

But beware: Do not call a White House official a White House official unless he or she has specifically approved that wording — and he or she indeed works directly for the White House. The generic term is “administration official,” or more commonly “senior administration official,” since regular administration officials are not often asked to brief the press. And a State Department official is an administration official but not a White House official.

The same goes for a Pentagon official. But a congressional official or aide is a different breed of politico. And sometimes any of the above might be generally obscured by referring to them only as a Republican or Democratic official, which could be someone in the party apparatus or in government.

The terminology also differs on the other side of the Atlantic. “Off-record” in U.S. parlance means not for publication anyway anyhow, while “on background” generally means it’s usable material but on a not-for-attribution basis. Whether it’s directly quotable is often a matter of negotiation.

The more reputable U.S. media outlets provide as much identifying material about an unnamed source as possible and never use the word “source,” but give some description to make clear why the person cited has a basis to talk about whatever he or she is talking about. But a lot of outlets just say “source” and some tabloids are known to tolerate pseudonyms (the current president had one in the days when he used to call the New York tabloids with juicy tidbits about himself).

— David Herszenhorn