I Spent a Decade in Newsrooms. Jaylen Brown Is Right to Call Out the Cowardice of Sports Media.

I've spent years protecting anonymous sources. That's why I believe ESPN, Stephen A. Smith and Colin Cowherd crossed an ethical line.

Jaylen Brown wearing a "State Your Source" t-shirt during the Celtics' championship parade.

By the time Jaylen Brown arrived in Philadelphia following his blockbuster trade from the Boston Celtics this week, the whispers had already beaten him there.

They were not really about the mechanics of the trade, or the future of the Celtics, or how Brown will perform on the court. They were about the man himself. His temperament. His ego. His intelligence. His ability, or supposed inability, to move through an organization without making the powerful uncomfortable.

The accusation, as it often does now, arrived without a face.

A source said. An executive believed. Someone around the league felt.

None of them signed their names.

I have spent enough time in newsrooms to understand the value of anonymity. When I was a reporter at the Chicago Tribune and USA Today, granting a source anonymity wasn’t treated as a casual favor. It was something closer to a burden. You did not grant it because a source wanted to speak freely. You granted it because the truth might otherwise stay buried.

The source risking a job to expose corruption. The employee speaking against a corporation. The person inside a public agency describing misconduct that could never be proven from the outside. In those cases, anonymity served a purpose larger than the source’s comfort. It protected someone with less power from someone with more.

That was the bargain. We concealed one name so the public could learn a greater truth.

What we are watching now in sports media is something different, and far uglier. Anonymous sourcing is no longer used primarily to protect people speaking truth up the hierarchy. Increasingly, it protects people speaking down it.

Front-office executives, scouts, agents, and league personnel can anonymously define a player’s character, while the player has to answer for the damage in public. The source remains hidden. The accusation travels. The reputation absorbs the bruise.