Introducing: Who's That Source?
Racket's new feature chronicles the money behind oft-quoted sources
Jeff Gerth, Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter and decades-long denizen of the front page, puts it this way. “The job of any journalist,” he says, “before you quote somebody, should be to see what their track record is. And if you’re going to call them an expert, explain why they’re an expert, don’t just say they teach at Harvard.”
Enter Who’s That Source? The new Racket feature goes a step beyond sites like Influence Watch, OpenSecrets, Nonprofit Explorer, MapLight, and others. Not only will we tell you whose money is behind a source quoted in the New York Times or Fox, we’ll check the track records of people called “experts,” highlight mispredictions, and compute a source’s “shill factor” — the percentage chance that the “expert opinion” is a politically predetermined conclusion. Has this Republican-funded organization ever criticized a Republican? Is this “follow the science” environmental group really a Democratic Party campaign committee?
Why this feature now? A large portion of what’s consumed as journalism is a pure partisan product, with ex-politicians reading out “news” stuffed with “facts” produced by de facto political action committees. Worse, the habit of relying on paid political mouthpieces comes at a time when stylistically, editors have less shame about presenting an “Experts Say” headline as a news event, when it’s really an op-ed or de facto advertisement. Some sites are shameless enough to shove “Experts Say” headlines into print without telling you which experts — a bottom-of-barrel sourcing technique we call “The Full Windbag.”
Source problems come in all shapes and sizes. After the 2008 financial crash, news outlets frequently cited financial “experts” who’d whiffed on housing market predictions or required multibillion-dollar bailouts, without mentioning their records. Nearly every major news firm ran aground on 2016 electoral predictions (“The entire commentariat is going to feel a little silly when Marco Rubio wins every Republican primary” was the should-have-been-legendary take of Ross Douthat), and the media saw industry-wide botches of the lab-leak story during COVID and, more recently, the Trump tariff panic. On the conservative side, the most common species of paid sources include oil and gas spokespeople, big-five military contractors, and analysts with ties to conservative outposts like the Hoover Institution (which is opening a Substack).
Either way, true independent analyses are becoming as rare as Amur Leopards — we’re at the “there are only eleven individuals left in the wild” stage.
