“I subscribe to Newsweek, mainly for the columnists, but partly because it’s now a thesaurus for awkward ways to say “an unidentified source.” When Newsweek fell into hot water a few months ago because of their use of unidentified sources they committed to cleaning up their act. So these days, they still use unidentified sources for all of their political stories, but now they throw in overblown explanations as to why the sources are unidentified. Things like, “… a source who wishes to remain anonymous because talking to the press can occasionally have unexpected and negative political effects” and “… a source who does not like the way his name looks in print.” “