It is a rare day, indeed, that I disagree with the Gray Lady, but the venerable New York Times was wrong to run an anonymous opinion piece earlier this month.

For those who missed it, the Times on Sept. 5 ran on its opinion pages an editorial penned by someone identified only as a “senior administration official.” The official claimed there are good-hearted Americans who work for Donald Trump but furtively derail the president’s most irrational impulses.

I don’t doubt the veracity of the piece or whether its author truly is a “senior administration official,” but it was still wrong to let someone make those assertions anonymously on its commentary pages.

The truth is, national media outlets overuse anonymous sources.

Most local newspapers, including The News, have a policy against using unnamed sources, with the rarest of exceptions. The only instance in which anonymous sources can be expected in The News are those stories in which we write about victims of sexual or domestic violence. Victims are granted anonymity unless they wish to be identified.

We put names to all of our sources because then you, the reader, know who to call to double-check our facts. When you know who gave us our information, you can judge for yourselves whether that information is credible.

Another reason we prohibit unnamed sources: We can’t ask our sources to be transparent if we aren’t being transparent ourselves.

There are legitimate reasons to use anonymous sources. On matters of national security or serious matters of governance, where the public’s need to know outweighs the need for transparency – and the story can’t be told without anonymous sources – their use may be necessary. The public needed to know President Richard Nixon may have been involved in a crime, and so Bob Woodward’s use of Deep Throat was justified.

Such cases rarely, if ever, present themselves to local newspaper reporters, and so they’d have a hard time convincing me they need to use an anonymous source.

Such cases rarely present themselves to national media outlets, either, and yet almost every story from the New York Times or the Washington Post is based around at least one “senior administration official” or “person briefed on the matter.” You find them in stories about palace intrigue at the White House and in think pieces about political maneuvers and in too many other day-to-day stories that, while important, have little effect on the lives of readers.

Again, I do not doubt that the anonymous sources are who they say they are and know what they say they know. I know the kind of vetting that goes into sourcing and history has proven those stories right time and again. Nixon wouldn’t have resigned if there was nothing to the whole Watergate thing.

But, especially in these days in which the press is called fake and biased and the enemy of the people, unnamed sources only give our critics ammunition. It’s easy to pick apart and deny a story when you can’t call a reporter’s source for yourself to verify the information they presented.

And the opinion pages, especially, are no place for anonymity.

Newspapers print commentary pages to create a place for civil debate, a safe place to exchange ideas and further a community conversation toward a better understanding of one another.

And the Times’ opinion pages are the country’s town hall, a place where the nation should be allowed to go for civil discourse on our great American experiment in democracy. It’s no place for masked men shouting accusations from their hiding places.

What’s worse, we didn’t even learn anything from the anonymous op-ed that hadn’t already been reported, so the Times hurt its already fragile credibility and gained nothing from it.

Justin A. Hinkley can be reached at 989-358-5686 or jhinkley@thealpenanews.com. Follow him on Twitter @JustinHinkley.