The secret sources the media use to spice up the political narrative of their choice

Anonymous “Democrats” feeding a major Wall Street Journal feature that suddenly pumped new life into the “Sleepy Joe” Biden narrative. Unnamed “senior Labor figures” keeping the Payman “revenge” agenda ticking over in Canberra courtesy of The Australian front page. It’s remarkable the access the proudly right-wing News Corp media has — often uniquely — to unidentified sources who happen to be expressing views damaging to centre-left parties.

It’s one of News Corp’s big contributions to journalism practice: the unnamed insider with a take that sustains the media narrative of the moment.

For News Corp, it’s one of the core innovations designed to combat the internet’s disruption of its traditional business model: how to sustain its influence when its journalism sits largely unread behind the hardest of paywalls with an over-70 subscriber base that is, literally, dying.

Now, in the United States, that bastion of old-style just-the-facts journalism, The New York Times, seems to have decided: sure could do with some of that! The result? A major campaign to force Biden out of this year’s presidential race off the back of...