You are reading a story. Halfway down, a sentence starts: "A senior administration official said..." No name. No face. Just a rank and a claim. Most readers scroll past it. But that phrase is not laziness and it is not an accident — it is the visible end of a negotiation that happened before the reporter typed a word, under a set of rules almost nobody outside newsrooms has ever had explained to them. * There are four of those rules. They are not vibes. The Associated Press sets them out in its own guidance on anonymous sources, and most major newsrooms use the same four rungs. Here they are, cleanest version first. * **On the record.** Everything the source says can be used, and their name goes on it. This is the default. It is also the only level where you, the reader, can hold a specific human being to a specific sentence. If a source is on the record and turns out to be lying, the lie has an owner. * **On background.** The information can be published, but the source is described rather than named — and the exact wording of that description is negotiated. This is where "a senior administration official," "a person familiar with the matter," and "a White House aide" are manufactured. The source gets to help write their own disguise, which is the part readers are never told. * **On deep background.** The information can be used, but with no attribution at all. Nothing points back to a person. The reporter writes the fact as if it fell out of the sky. If you have ever read a sentence like "the plan is expected to be announced next week" with no source attached, you may have just read deep background. * **Off the record.** The information cannot be published, full stop. It exists to steer the reporter — to stop them chasing a wrong story, or to point them at a right one they will then have to confirm somewhere else. Off the record is not a gag on the truth. It is a gag on that specific conversation. * Now the part that costs people jobs: these rules only bind if they are agreed *in advance*. The AP's own guidance is explicit that ground rules should be set in an explicit discussion before the interview. You cannot say something, watch the reporter's eyebrows go up, and then add "that was off the record." The reporter has no obligation to honour a retroactive request, and most will not. Anything said before the words "off the record" are spoken is on the record. * Here is why any of this matters to a reader rather than to a press officer. * Background is the level that gets abused, and it gets abused in a very particular direction. A government or a company holds a briefing, puts an official in the room, and rules that the official may only be called "a senior administration official." Everybody in the room already knows exactly who it is. The public does not. The result is that a named human being gets to make claims in every newspaper in the country while carrying none of the reputational cost of being wrong. That is not source protection. That is a press release wearing a trench coat. * Reporters know this and periodically revolt about it. CBS News reported on White House correspondents pushing back on not-for-attribution briefings, including an Associated Press effort to organise a joint protest. The revolt always fizzles for the same structural reason: no outlet can afford to walk out of a briefing that its competitors will stay in. Background survives not because journalists like it but because it is enforced by the fear of being scooped. * The most instructive case of what "senior official" can actually mean is the New York Times op-ed of September 5, 2018, published under the byline "Anonymous" and described by the Times as coming from a senior official in the Trump administration. It ran everywhere for two years. Then on October 28, 2020, the author revealed himself: Miles Taylor, who had worked as chief of staff to the Homeland Security secretary. The Washington Post immediately ran a piece asking the obvious question — was "senior official" an accurate description of that job? That argument is the whole game in miniature. The label was negotiated. The label did the persuading. And the label turned out to be doing a lot of lifting. * So read for the label. It is the single most information-dense thing in a sourced sentence, and it is the thing readers skip. * "According to a person familiar with the negotiations" tells you the source is probably in the room but wants deniability. "According to two people briefed on the matter" tells you the source is one step removed and may be repeating a version they were handed. "Officials said" with no number is the weakest of all — it could be two people or it could be one person the reporter is pluralising to make the sentence sound sturdier. * And when there is no attribution at all — when a hard, specific, forward-looking claim simply sits there unowned — you are almost certainly reading deep background. Somebody chose to put that fact in your head while making sure you could never ask them why. * None of this means anonymity is a scam. Whistleblowers, leaked documents, sources inside police forces and hospitals and defence ministries — those people need the shield, and the shield is one of the few things journalism does that power genuinely cannot route around. The four levels exist so that shield can be granted deliberately instead of accidentally. * The problem is that the same shield protects the person risking their career and the press officer avoiding accountability, and the sentence in your newspaper looks identical either way. The only defence a reader has is to notice which one they are probably looking at. * One quick rule that works surprisingly often: ask what the source gains. A source with something to lose by talking is usually worth the anonymity. A source who is anonymous while saying something flattering about their own boss is not a whistleblower. They are a spokesperson who got a discount on the risk.