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Try as I might, it seems impossible to avoid the saga of Jayson Blair and the New York Times. He was a reporter who took great liberties with the truth, and the newspaper fired him -- a long time after it should have shown him the door.
But the occasional fabricating reporter is not a major problem in American journalism. Every trade or profession has its scoundrels and cheats -- engineers who deliberately ignore safety problems, lawyers who suborn perjury, physicians who neglect patients, presidents who violate the constitution -- and the world goes on.
The same holds with all the hand-writing about How
could this happen at the New York Times, one of the world's
most respected newspapers?
Wasn't it the Times that all but convicted Wen Ho Lee of
treason at Los Alamos, without any evidence? Wasn't it the
Times that kept promoting the Clintons' Whitewater
Scandal,
as if it were important, when it was just a
routine real-estate hustle that lost money?
The last (and perhaps only) time that I was ever quoted
in one of those respected national newspapers, the Wall
Street Journal identified me as a newspaper publisher from
the hamlet of Salida.
I've never been a newspaper
publisher here, and Salida is an incorporated city, the
biggest one in a 50-mile radius, which is more than you can
say for San Francisco or Washington, D.C.
Your town has to be pretty big to get past hamlet status
when those East Coast journalists start sneering -- Brill's
Content, the magazine that was supposed to critique
American journalism, once referred to Boulder as a
mountain hamlet.
When I was a journalism student in college, more than 30 years ago, we got the impression that truth mattered. But the Associated Press taught me differently.
Some details have faded from memory, but the student government at the University of Northern Colorado had voted to support a fashionable cause, along the lines of boycotting grapes or lettuce to show solidarity with Cesar Chavez and the farm-workers' union.
Several students had picketed a Greeley supermarket, and had been arrested. There was a suggestion that, since they were pursuing the policy of the student government, then student funds could be used to pay for their defense.
Since most of the student government's money came from mandatory student fees, it didn't seem proper to use that money. But someone in student government got an idea -- since the student newspaper, the Mirror, was owned by the student government, why not appropriate Mirror advertising revenue for the defense, rather than student fee money?
As an editor at the Mirror at the time, I opposed this, but the student government did control the purse strings, no matter how independent we wanted the newspaper to be. However, the student government had decided to ask the Colorado attorney general's office for a legal opinion before appropriating the money.
Several days later, I picked up a Denver daily, and saw an Associated Press story quoting a state senator who was praising the UNC administration and the state attorney general for stopping an illegal use of student funds.
The student government was not about to spend funds illegally -- that's why the attorney general's opinion had been solicited. And the school administration had taken no part in this. So this story was a blatant falsehood, based only on the rantings of some state senator who either didn't know what he was talking about, or else was lying in order to gain political points by denouncing left-wing students and their causes.
Nothing we had learned in reporting classes applied. The story had only one source, when you were supposed to have at least two. That source's statements had not been checked, and you're always supposed to do that. The people criticized in the story had been given no chance to comment, and you're supposed to do that, too. And this swill came from the world's leading objective-news source.
So I called the Denver AP office to inquire as to who might have broken in and perpetrated this piece of shoddy journalism in the name of the mighty Associated Press. I was told that the truth didn't matter, just as long as AP quoted the senator correctly.
That's what's really wrong with American journalism -- the day-in, day-out accurate quoting of official sources, without ever bothering to find out whether they're telling the truth. The Jayson Blairs of this world are the infrequent exceptions, and it's the routine that we should worry about.
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