First take: The part of a journalistic report that identifies the sources of information in a story. Often presented as “according to” recognized or official sources, as in “the Surgeon General reports that.” In addition, attribution appears in tags within interviews, as in “the Senator said.” 

Deeper: Journalism handbooks about newsgathering commonly insist that attribution is required in any instance where information is not witnessed first hand by the reporter.  In addition, daily reporters are advised that sources should be identified by their professional positions (as in “The Director of Public Affairs”) and with careful attention to verb tenses which indicate past statements (“he said”) or continuing views (“she believes”).  On the whole, attribution is directly tied to the news profession’s insistence on direct witnessing, independent verification, and the idea that reporters convey others’ opinions, not their own.

In the practice of long-form narrative journalism, however, there are many modifications of these general conventions. Despite recurrent debates over the use of anonymous sources, subjects who do not want to be quoted, or who will agree to conveying information on “deep background,” often do not have their views or statements attributed to them even in a daily report. And if the journalist acquires, over time, expertise in a particular subject, quite often facts or research findings also appear without attribution; in this way, we learn that journalists often enhance their authority by the absorption of others’ expertise and, in some instances, by having mastered specialized discourses themselves.  On top of that, free indirect discourse (see entry and the discussion in Chapter 3) actually serves, implicitly, as indirect quotation and thus attribution. And finally, of course, many works of long-form or narrative journalism deflect or delete attributions entirely to enhance their literary realism (see the discussion in Chapter 3).  See also the entry on “the telling occasion.” 

Recommended sources:  Richard V. Ericson, “How Journalists Visualize Fact,”  nnals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences.  560 (Nov. 1998):  83-95; Mark Carlson, On the Condition of Anonymity (Urbana:  University of Illinois Press, 2011).