Andrew Rosenthal, Columnist

Keep the Whistle-Blower Safe and Anonymous

Reputable news organizations shouldn’t be selective about what sources they protect.

October 27, 2019 at 9:00 PM UTC

Andrew Rosenthal is the former editorial page editor of the New York Times, where he participated in one Pulitzer Prize and was a finalist for another. He has held fellowships at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2018, he published “The New York Times Book of Politics.”

A source worth protecting.
Source: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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My father, A.M. Rosenthal, longtime editor of the New York Times, published the Pentagon Papers 48 years ago. For 35 years, until he died, I never heard him acknowledge that it was the Pentagon analyst Daniel Ellsberg who provided the papers to the Times. Dad had given his word to keep the source’s identity secret.

Similarly, it was not until Mark Felt, the former FBI official, declared at age 91 that he was the Watergate source known as Deep Throat, that reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and the Washington Post as an institution felt free to acknowledge that he was indeed the informant.