The use of unnamed sources by journalists desperate to get the big story dates back long before Ben Bradlee's Washington Post. But it was Bradlee's team of Bob Woodward and Carl Berstein and their use of the famous "Deep Throat" to help them break the Watergate story that helped thrust the issue into the spotlight.

And although he sometimes bemoans the use of off-the-record sources, Bradlee admits his paper's decisions to use Deep Throat, whose identity remained secret for more than 30 years, ushered in a new era of anonymous reporting.

		Bradlee, with the support of Post publisher Katherine Graham, allowed Watergate to usher in a new era of anonymous source reporting.

The high official leaking information to the Post was Mark Felt, the No. 2 man at the FBI at the time of Watergate. Felt repeatedly gave advice to Woodward to focus on the money trail connecting the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters to the committee to re-elect President Nixon.

But in the decades since Deep Throat, the debate over the use of anonymous sources has intensified.

After Watergate, Woodward went on to write numerous books focused on the Clinton and Bush administrations, the Supreme Court and other topics using unnamed sources to recount conversations and incidents.

Many pieces in both The Washington Post and New York Times have carried accusations, policy trial balloons and political attacks without a source attributed to the information.

That continuing phenomena has prompted a backlash among some journalists, civic activists and others seeking to limit the impact of these unaccountable voices.

"I think that you can actually go back to Watergate and after Watergate, which depended a lot on anonymous sources to break the story; you couldn't have broken it without it. But I think that reporters have gotten to where they depend upon anonymous sources much too much," Jack Nelson of the Los Angeles Times said in 1998 on the NewsHour.

"Reporters, I think, sometimes use anonymous sources when they don't have to, because they think it strengthens the story, if they say that this is according to an anonymous source, and as a result, you wind up with stories that really sometimes are just not adequately documented."

The corrupting nature of these sources is not lost on Bradlee.

"People don't talk to reporters because they love them," Bradlee told Lehrer. "They talk to them because they want to talk to them. ... You understand that and you know what they're trying to do if you are a good reporter. ... [You ask] 'Why the hell is this guy talking to me?'"

But many in the journalist field find that the additional level of skepticism is missing from most journalism.

		Bradlee urges all reports to ask one question of the anonymous source: "Why the hell is this guy talking to me?'"

"[W]hat we don't think about in terms of these kinds of sources is that they represent a kind of privileged information pure and simple on the part of an insider group of reporters who are in the hip pockets, in my mind, in my opinion anyway, of major politicians and bureaucrats," Joan Hoff, professor of history at Montana State University, told Jim Lehrer in 2003.

"And it's not that they are objectively getting leaks, they are getting leaks usually from -- the conservative reporters are getting them from conservative politicians and bureaucrats, and the liberal reporters are getting them from liberal politicians and bureaucrats."

That said, some of the most newsworthy stories in the past year were due to leaks and anonymous sources.

Reports on the existence of CIA prisons holding terror suspects, the existence of a National Security Agency warrantless wiretapping effort to track calls originating from the United States and other sensitive matters have only come to light due to the use of anonymous sources.

And sources have paid a heavy price at times for their leaks. In April 2006, Mary McCarthy, a 20-year veteran of the CIA, was fired for leaking the secret prison story to The Washington Post.

McCarthy was "faced with a situation that's real. The director is in favor of torture. And their only other recourse is Congress. And Congress, the oversight committees -- I hate to say this, but it's a joke," Ray McGovern, a retired CIA analyst, told Jim Lehrer. "I knew Mary pretty well. She's got a lot of integrity. And, you know, you can argue that she has a moral responsibility and a legal responsibility."

But at the same time, a federal investigation into the leaking of a covert CIA operative's identity -- possibly by officials in the Bush administration -- has cast a more questionable light on the issue.

A federal grand jury has indicted the former chief of staff of Vice President Cheney for lying to investigators looking into how Valerie Plame's name appeared in print, but the investigation has also exposed the cozy relationship between sources and journalists, creating a new chapter in the book largely started by Ben Bradlee's Post when Deep Throat whispered in Woodward's ear, "Follow the money."

-- Compiled by Lee Banville for the Online NewsHour