Last Updated: May 20, 1999
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The Globe and New Republic’s fabrication troubles have
led many to ask if the same fate could happen to them; editors and academics
discuss how to prevent it
It’s the kind of nightmare story that editors tell around the campfire
to scare the young folk: Once upon a time, a newspaper writer made up some
stuff and it got in the paper and the truth came out and ... Actually it
is a story likelier to scare the editors, who know it could happen to any
one of them.
It’s been a tough year for journalistic credibility. Shortly after it
was discovered that a New Republic writer had made up stories and shortly
before CNN retracted a story on alleged military use of nerve gas, The
Boston Globe announced that columnist Patricia Smith had made up names
and quotes in some of her columns.
The American Editor asked editors and journalism educators around the
country to share advice on how to detect fiction in newswriting, how to
avoid it and, if it drops on your head, how to respond.
Once it happens
For whatever comfort it may bring Matthew Storin, The Boston Globe editor,
his colleagues around the country feel he handled it well.
"Act quickly, openly and forthrightly," said Rich Oppel, editor of the
Austin (Texas) American-Statesman. "You and the paper will get dumped on
because of the fabrication by a reporter or someone else, and you should.
But people know that — occasionally — lawyers are crooked, cops steal,
doctors bury their mistakes and reporters lie. They’re equally interested
in how the editor handles the lie. Try to put one over on them and you’re
dead meat. Do it the way Matt Storin did it, no B.S."
Storin said about the only heartening thing to come out of this was
that the Globe itself called attention to the problem: "However haphazardly,
we did pick up on it ourselves."
Several editors said that while making up quotes is a firing offense,
and they would accept no excuses for it, they thought the CNN kind of story
probably causes more serious harm.
"A lot more damage was done by the CNN story," said Bruce DeSilva, enterprise
editor for The Associated Press. "They didn’t create facts. They made a
mistake. They did a sloppy job. We make errors and do sloppy work every
day." Most sloppy stories, however, aren’t as high profile, he said.
"There are a lot of people who tell us stuff that’s bullshit. We publish
‘so-and-so said ... a whole bunch of crap.’ As long as we attribute it,
we think it’s OK to put it in the paper.
"Editors don’t challenge writers enough about how they know what they
know. Not just how did the writer get it, but how did the source get it.
Reporters don’t ask sources," DeSilva said.
How to detect it
Storin pointed out a warning sign that most editors interviewed repeated:
"Look out for the story that seems to be too good to be true, the quote
too eloquent to be legitimate."
One reason editors may have been slow to pick up on the fictional elements,
he said, is that "columnists are vulnerable to unfair charges. They make
a lot of enemies. They cover wide-ranging subject areas and often cover
people not as well known as people in politics."
Paul Anderson, associate professor emeritus at the University of Tennessee-Martin,
suggested editors start with "a clearly stated policy that any reporter
willfully falsifying information in a story will soon be working somewhere
else, if they can get another job. Especially young reporters need to be
reminded that the only thing we have to sell is credibility. Once that’s
gone, we’re out of business as an individual and a newspaper."
"Every editor at each step in the process has critical roles to play:
the assigning editor, the copy editor, the copy desk chief, the editor
responsible for placement of stories, the editor who approves the story
for publication, the senior editor in the newsroom," said Bob Giles, Freedom
Forum senior vice president and executive director of the Media Studies
Center in New York.
"My model for the modern editor in any of these roles," Giles said,
"is attorney Floyd Abrams, whose independent investigation of CNN’s broadcast
Valley of Death concluded that the central thesis of the broadcast — that
the use of nerve gas by the United States in Laos to kill Americans who
had defected to the enemy — could not be sustained.
"Abrams thinks like a lawyer but reads copy like an editor. He is skeptical.
He studies the text for nuances, for ambiguities. He examines the background
of principal sources to assess whether there are patterns of instability
or other factors that might cast doubt on the credibility of their statements.
He can smell out sources skilled in refusing to answer questions directly.
He can recognize which sources are in a position to know something of value
to the story and which are not. He looks at reporters’ notes and, in the
case of television, the out-takes, to determine whether, in selecting what
goes in the story and what gets left out, the context has been shaped to
confirm the journalists’ beliefs about the story. He demonstrates a lawyer’s
knack for saying what if the story is wrong and testing it from that perspective."
Two checklists
Two editors offered checklists:
From Mel Opotowsky, managing editor of The Press-Enterprise in Riverside,
Calif.:
-
Conduct periodic, routine surveys of people mentioned in stories, asking
them about accuracy, fairness and other issues. It is good in itself and
it is good when the staff knows these checks are being made.
-
Discuss with staff — individually and in groups — ethical issues, making
crystal clear your opposition to such things as plagiarism, making up material,
changing direct quotes (even to help a subject’s image).
-
Fire anyone caught making up facts and quotes. Don’t allow them to resign,
but fire them, to make crystal clear your position on such issues.
-
When an example is uncovered, deal with it quickly and actively. Give back
any awards, tell readers and staff the whole story, including any mitigating
circumstances. Explain why the practice is not acceptable (even to the
point of telling the obvious). But you tell the mitigating circumstances
— don’t give the liar another forum.
-
Don’t be understanding or sympathetic. The person has hurt not only you
and the paper, but every staffer around.
Sam Pollak, editor of The Daily Star, Oneonta, N.Y., suggested the following
when dealing with less-experienced reporters on smaller papers:
-
Don’t assume that younger reporters are grounded in the same ethics as
prior generations. These folks have been raised more on TV than print,
and that often means expediency and presentation can take precedence over
factual, complete, fair reporting. Tell them what’s expected and listen
to them when they disagree.
-
While editors have to keep standards high, scared reporters don’t do consistently
good work. Don’t put a reporter into a position where he feels he’s going
to lose his job or beat if he doesn’t hit a home run on the very next story.
-
Give the reporter confidence. Let him know that you know that sometimes
the ball is not going to bounce his way. When (not if) he gets beaten on
a story, go over the reasons with him without rancor. Make sure he knows
that he’s being judged on the body of his work, and not just the most recent
story.
-
Have a rule that states that no unnamed sources will be used in any story
unless the reporter’s supervisor knows who the source is. If the reporter
refuses to reveal it to the supervisor, leave it out of the story. No exceptions.
Of course, try to keep all unnamed source use to a minimum.
-
Make sure your people know the names Janet Cooke, Patricia Smith and Stephen
Glass, and why they lost their honor and their jobs.
Don’t fret over prizes
Bill Simmons, political editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Little
Rock, offered a safeguard: "Don’t worry about prizes. Worry about journalism:
Get it right. There is no higher law in journalism than getting it right.
Accuracy is the be-all and the end-all. Without accuracy, nothing else
matters. If you can get it right and write well, terrific. But truth is
the element that under no circumstances can be sacrificed. Make that clear
from the beginning in your interactions with the reporter. And emphasize
it again and again as time goes by."
Michael Gartner, editor and co-owner of The Tribune, Ames, Iowa, said:
"You ban the use of anonymous quotes and anonymous allegations, and that
includes banning anecdotes or stories that just use the first name of people;
you never, ever, ever use a secondary source — so a reporter or columnist
must get in the habit of calling the primary source even to confirm quotes
that their own colleagues put in the newspaper. ...
"You emphasize to your staff that corrections do not harm their careers
— but that hiding mistakes does. You listen carefully to people who call
in to complain. You ask them in for a cup of coffee so you can hear them
out. Then, if you determine they are right, you apologize, you correct
the error, and you sit down with the reporter or the columnist and go over,
in a non-threatening way, just how it happened.
"Lots can be done to create an environment that discourages fraud,"
said Caesar Andrews, editor of Gannett News Service. "You can set high
standards. Talk about ethics in advance of crises. Let people know if they
cross the line, they’ll be fired. Encourage folks to quickly speak up if
they see or sense problems. Spot-check suspect work. And make credibility
a bigger factor in hiring and in performance reviews. But without tailing
each journalist with a full-service detective, no newsroom can thoroughly
police each employee. Even with a detective on the case, someone still
has to anticipate when and why otherwise good journalists might be motivated
to do wrong."
"I always — always — edit with the reporter sitting next to me," said
Michael Weinstein, senior editor of The Charlotte Observer. "I read the
story aloud to them and ask questions along the way. This is SOP. They
now expect it from me. If I’m really really busy, it’s because this is
how we do business. Even on 6-inch stories. Briefs, obviously, we hold
to a lesser standard. For stories written by reporters on the road or in
bureaus, I call them on the phone, tell them to call up their story and
read the story to them sentence by sentence. The reporter gets the chance
to hear the story in another voice, and hear how each and every fact sounds.
Many times reporters have stopped me as I’m reading and say, ‘That isn’t
true’ or ‘Take that out!’ "
If it quacks like a duck...
Sharon Rosenhause, managing editor/news of the San Francisco Examiner,
offered two "protections (I don’t think there are guarantees): Insist on
names in stories. Don’t settle for general descriptions. Even in stories
that are careful to protect, say, law enforcement sources, we have an editor
who knows who the source is. In other stories, there is no reason not to
name by name the people we write about."
And two: "Trust your gut. You know when a quote is perfect, or too perfect.
You know that people don’t talk that way. Feel free to question the writer:
Did so and so really say that that way? I’ve asked and been told the writer
‘cleaned up’ the quote. Well, we don’t clean up quotes. Or help them."
"Editors and reporters need to ask one question over and over and over:
How do you know that?" said Tom Silvestri, Media General’s director of
news synergy and newsbank editor. "When I’ve asked that question, I’ve
always gotten a good handle on the sourcing, reporting and how much further
to check the facts. Also, editors shouldn’t divorce themselves from the
gathering of information. Fact gathering isn’t just a reporter thing."
"Two decades ago, when I was a feature editor, one of our summer copy
clerks wanted to get into print," said Craig Klugman, editor of The Journal
Gazette, Fort Wayne, Ind. "So she turned in a compelling story about an
unidentified Ivy League student who had spent her teen-age years as a prostitute.
"Obviously a good story. Great quotes. Naturally the woman had had a
horrendous childhood. I asked two questions: (1) Can we put anything in
this story that would add some specificity, such as what high school she
went to, what she was studying in college, what her police record would
show? And (2) between you and me, who is this person? How do you know her?
The clerk said that there was absolutely nothing else she could add, and
that the deal with the ‘source’ was that absolutely no one else could know
who she was. I never ran the story, of course."
While most editors said fact-checking is impractical for newspapers,
Frank E. Fee Jr., Knight Professor of Editing at the E.W. Scripps School
of Journalism, Ohio University, said: "Anyone who doesn’t spot-check routinely
is asking for trouble, not so much out of suspicion as simply in the interests
of accuracy and an understanding that humans are fallible. Yes, the copy
desk is overworked and spread thin, but these checks must be made. It has
always been scary that when I have checked, we’ve prevented an error. How
many get through on those stories that weren’t checked?"
Catherine Shen, vice president of strategic development of Horvitz Newspapers,
Bellevue, Wash., retold a tale from "The Kingdom and the Power," about
The New York Times.
"A young reporter was assigned to input an endless list of awards. In
the middle of this tedious task, to amuse himself, he inserted Hemingway’s
(characters) Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley as winners of some fictional
award. He never took out the joke, and it made it into the paper. The editor
took the reporter aside and kindly told him he would never again in his
life work for The New York Times, that what he had done violated so egregiously
the basic tenets of the profession of journalism. This was a young, beginning
reporter, but that newspaper, at that time, had a hard line that no one
could cross."
Redemption?
If fraud occurs, can this reporter be saved?
"Depends," said Rich Oppel, editor in Austin. "Is she young and inexperienced?
Did she have a weak editor who wasn’t adequate to the tasks of instruction
and mentoring? Was the fabrication of very minor significance? Perhaps,
then. But I wouldn’t give much leeway, and probably none to a veteran —
unless there was a serious extenuating situation, like drug or alcohol
addiction and the employee was being remanded to treatment. Fundamentally,
lying is a firing offense. I haven’t seen many instances where ‘second
chances’ turn things around."
What is called lying now used to be called hoaxes in the early days
of the penny press: "Hoaxes in newspapers are nothing new," said Eric Newton,
managing editor of the Newseum in Arlington, Va. "Ben Franklin did it,
so did Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken and many, many others.
What’s new is that we no longer think it’s funny."
Kees is editor and program director of The Freedom Forum Pacific
Coast Center, San Francisco.
