Pakistan media: Unnamed sources reveal political crises and law and order problems

Abstract

Journalists use sources to accord credibility to their news stories. However, they use unnamed sources when they feel the sources would be harmed for revealing information to the media. This qualitative study analyzes news from unnamed sources in political stories in Pakistani media. It uses grounded theory to find common themes in the news obtained from unnamed sources. The common themes found in the study were about political crises, and breakdown of law and order in Pakistan. The author discusses the ways in which unnamed sources were used in the stories. Many unnamed sources gave views that were different from those given by named sources in the same story, while a few stories did not give any indication of the rank of the unnamed sources in the hierarchy of the political party or the army.