This is not meant to criticize Bernstein: I don't know any electricians from Lutsk, but I would rather have one of them in my mind's eye than anyone identified as "an analyst," "an expert," "a lawyer involved in the case," "a senior State Department official," "a Democratic strategist" or any of the other standardized obfuscations that can make a morning with The Times so exasperating.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/weekinreview/13bott.html?hp

Last winter, I met Jason B. Williams, a New York University journalism student who was writing his master's thesis on unidentified sources in The Times. By reading every bylined A-section news story published in December 2003, Williams determined that 40 percent of the articles invoked at least one anonymous source, that the average day's paper brought 36 such sources into the reader's home and that more than half of these people were identified, at least in part, as "officials."

Finally, it's worth reconsidering the entire nature of reportorial authority and responsibility. In other words, why quote anonymous sources at all? Do their words take on more credibility because they're flanked with quotation marks? If Waxman and Holson had written their article in their own voice, eschewing all blind quotes and meaningless attributions and making only the assertions they were confident were true, we could hold someone responsible for the accuracy: not the dubious sources, but the writers themselves. Isn't that the way it ought to be?