WASHINGTON —  Anonymous sources have been condemned by the Bush White House as a threat to the credibility of the media and called an "evil of journalism" by USA Today founder Al Neuharth.

But even as news organizations scramble to write new policies to limit their reliance on unnamed sources, the unveiling Tuesday of the world's most famous anonymous source, Deep Throat, reminds the media and the public why their use is sometimes necessary, journalism experts say.

The Washington Post confirmed Tuesday that 91-year-old W. Mark Felt, the FBI's No. 2 official during the early 1970s who now lives in Santa Rosa, was the secret source for stories by reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that helped bring down Richard Nixon's presidency in the Watergate scandal.

"It is deeply ironic that the mother of all anonymous sources -- which precipitated some really tectonic changes in the American political scene, including the resignation of a president -- should be coming forward at a time when anonymous sources are being so impugned," said Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. "I think it would be an incalculable loss to this country if all anonymous sources became forbidden, particularly in this era of governmental and corporate secrecy -- and I might add, ecclesiastical secrecy. The price has been raised very high for whistle-blowers."

The use of unnamed sources has been under fire recently after Newsweek retracted a story last month that cited anonymous sources claiming that investigators at Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba believed U.S. guards flushed a Quran down the toilet to unnerve Muslim prisoners.

Newsweek apologized for the story, which some cite as the reason for deadly riots that followed in Afghanistan, saying the unnamed source of the report had backed away from his initial claims after the story was published. An Amnesty International report last week found that a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay had complained that a Quran was flushed in a toilet, but a Pentagon inquiry found no evidence to back up the claim.

The Newsweek controversy led White House spokesman Scott McClellan to complain about "a credibility problem in the media regarding the use of anonymous sources."

But media experts said that while news organizations take a risk in relying on unnamed sources, it is often the only way to uncover some information.

"There are certain kinds of reporting that cannot be done without sources who are unnamed, in particular reporting on national security or defense ... because people jeopardize their careers and in some cases their legal status by disclosing things," said James Bettinger, a longtime reporter and editor at the Riverside Press-Enterprise and the San Jose Mercury News who directs the John S. Knight journalism fellowship program at Stanford University.

"That said, there is too great a reliance on anonymous sources," Bettinger said. "That's why every news organization I know of is trying to reduce their use or their reliance on anonymous sources."

Woodward and Bernstein issued a statement Tuesday saying Felt "helped us immeasurably in our Watergate coverage," although they said many other sources were also involved. Former Washington Post Editor Ben Bradlee told the paper: "The No. 2 guy at the FBI -- that was a pretty good source."

"Deep Throat represents the kind of source that a lot of reporters would like to have," Bettinger said. "He served as someone that Woodward could go to on a regular basis and say, 'Are we on the right track?' ... That is a huge fear of every good reporter, 'Do we have this right?' "

Many papers began re-examining their policies on the use of unnamed sources in 2003 after the New York Times acknowledged it had failed to adequately check sources quoted by reporter Jayson Blair, who was fired for fabricating stories.

The Blair scandal and the forced resignation of USA Today reporter Jack Kelley for similar charges prompted Neuharth to write a Jan. 15, 2004, column calling for a media wide ban on anonymous sources. "Until or unless we do, the public won't trust us, and we put the First Amendment in jeopardy," he wrote.

But some journalists have recently spoken out about the need for anonymous sources. Daniel Schorr, senior news analyst for NPR radio, wrote in a syndicated column last week that unnamed sources provided the first photos and accounts of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, as well as a 2,000-page secret file of an Army investigation about the torture and killing of two prisoners in Afghanistan, recently reported by the New York Times.

"On many vital matters, we would be left in the dark were it not for leaks," Schorr wrote.

Brooks Jackson, a longtime reporter for the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal and CNN, said the mistake often made -- as seen in the Newsweek case -- is to rely on an unnamed source who is a step removed from the news.

"Often it's second-hand information, and if that's not made clear, then the reader is not being served very well," said Jackson, who now directs www.factcheck.org, a nonpartisan group.hatever obstacles, legal and moral, were in our way," he said. "I feel that we deserve an amount of accountability by our officials for the decisions they make."

© Copyright 2005 San Francisco Chronicle

###