Confidential Sources?

There's been much furor today over the announcement that Facebook was to end third party fact checking, as part of Zuckerberg's attempts to cosy up to Trump.  (Apparently, third party moderation is too open to political bias, whereas the 'community' fact checking system they are proposing as a replacement isn't - a theory which flies in the face of established facts on the subject).  The irony of this sort of reaction from the UK's media is that, increasingly, most of their reporting is barely fact based.  OK, in many cases, it is entirely fact-free.  Most of their reporting seems to based upon a journalist's access to 'confidential sources' who must always remain anonymous.  The implication being that these sources are somehow 'connected', insiders, be it in politics, business or whatever, ho have access to actual information.  Personally, I find them of highly dubious quality.  Indeed, I wonder if they exist at all.  Or, are they like those 'In-The-Know' sources endlessly referenced by football websites, who supposedly have the inside track on player transfers and managerial sackings and appointments, but are invariably wrong and usually turn out to be the assistant groundsman's sister's boyfriend's second cousin's hairdresser, who once cut the boot boy's hair.  I mean, bearing in mind that both the police and security services in the UK seem to want to rely upon the public for intelligence gathering, forever urging us to ring confidential phone lines to report on any suspicious 'foreign-looking' types we see buying the New Statesman or The Guardian, are the media now following the same model?

Could it be that the likes of The Daily Mail and Express are  down to using nosy neighbours as sources?  (Let's face it, The Sun has been doing it for decades while The Daily Star hasn't run a story that wasn't complete fiction since, well, the day it first rolled off the presses).  After all, for stories abut horrendous crimes, who could be a better source for speculation about the victims and suspected perpetrators than that bloke from down the street who spends his days peering at houses through binoculars, logging his neighbours' every movements?  "Yes, I have it on record here, that I definitely saw Mr Smith from Number Nine, regularly going in through the back door of Number Sixteen to have sex with Mrs Jones in her living room - they never drew the curtains - in the weeks leading up to her murder."  Even better, nowadays we have those voyeurs who set up cameras all all over their properties, not to protect them against burglars, but to spy on the neighbours - they have footage that could rival any surveillance operation by MI5.  Then there are those bloody doorbell cameras which are becoming ever more prevalent, again ostensibly so that you can see who is knocking on your door without opening it, or when you aren't at home, but in reality capturing footage of every passer by.  

Now, you might say, this is all very well as a source for information on news stories that involve ordinary people in ordinary neighbourhoods, but how could it ever be an effective replacement for high level sources on stories involving the great and the good?  Well, what if that nosy neighbour had been adamant that it wasn't Mr Smith going in Mrs Jones' back door before she was murdered, but Liberal Party leader Ed Davey?  Or Prince Andrew (a more likely candidate)?  Not good enough for an arrest, perhaps, (although with the current state of the UK police, you never know), but certainly good enough for the press to smear the allegation across their front pages.  What if he reckoned that it wasn't Mr Brown from Number Forty's dog shitting on Number Twenty Two's lawn, but the Archbishop of Canterbury, (presumably taking time off from covering up sex abuse cases)?  Again, I strongly suspect that that might make the front pages, too.  You can also guarantee that, if they get their observations into the papers, even anonymously, for the smaller stuff, before you know it, these nosy neighbours will get a taste for it and start expanding their operations.  They'll start hanging around parks where politicians take their afternoon strolls, in the hope of overhearing a confidential conversation on a sensitive subject, or standing on milk crates to peer through the windows of motels where some minor league celebrity (or someone who looks a bit like them) has gone for an illicit assignation.  For all we know, some of those supposed high-level political sources are actually simply the nosy neighbours of the politicians involved, busy listening at connecting walls with upturned glasses, or watching them on their security and doorbell cameras.  Who needs facts in journalism when you can have much more interesting rumours, instead?