Politics & Power Quote by Joe Klein

Klein is doing two things at once: defending a much-maligned newsroom habit while also shrinking it down to size. By calling anonymous sources “a practice of American journalism in the 20th and 21st century,” he frames it as institutional, procedural, and modern - something born of bureaucratic states, permanent campaigns, and the professionalized press. In other words: don’t treat it like sacred law. It’s a tool, recently invented, and therefore contestable.

Then he pulls a sly rhetorical judo move: he widens the lens from “sources” to “anonymity.” The Bible is the ultimate authority text in the West; invoking it smuggles in a kind of cultural permission slip. If some of the most formative stories in our civilization arrived without bylines, Klein implies, the panic over unnamed leakers starts to look parochial, even precious. The subtext is a critique of purity tests in media criticism: we act as if attribution is the only guarantee of truth, when in practice power often demands the opposite.

There’s also an edge of self-awareness here. Anonymous sourcing, especially in Washington journalism, can be both a flashlight and a fog machine - exposing real wrongdoing while enabling spin, cowardice, and agenda laundering. Klein’s contrast invites skepticism without moral grandstanding: anonymity isn’t inherently virtuous or corrupt; it’s a longstanding narrative strategy that shifts responsibility onto the reader and the institution. The line lands because it turns a contemporary controversy into a question of genre, authority, and trust.