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March 16, 2008
Will Get Fooled Again...and again...and again
One day last week I found these words written on the whiteboard in the journalism lab: "If your mother says she loves you, check it out."
I laughed out loud (a mordant chuckle really--to borrow a term from Bob Somerby). And that drew a few curious looks from the students in my feature writing class. I explained my chuckle to them as I erased the board: I saw this for the first time in my introductory textbook when I was your age. What made me laugh is that what this represents--a discipline of verification--is the lost art of journalism. Which is really a bad thing because--in a very real and important sense--this discipline IS journalism.
Something awful happens between the lessons we teach students about journalism done right and what they end up producing as professionals. Sometimes the results are entertaining, e.g. the tale of Heywood Jablome. But, at other times, the sheer laziness and stupidity makes me sad. Clark Hoyt, public editor for The New York Times, takes a look at how "Margaret B. Jones" fooled the mighty book review apparatus of the great "paper of record." Here's the part that struck me:
Kakutani said she did not try to verify the account of Margaret B. Jones because Riverhead sent her a 10-page Q. and A. with the author, discussing her life story and the book. Kakutani assumed, she said, especially after the celebrated case of James Frey, who made up parts of his best-selling “A Million Little Pieces,” that “the publishers had vetted the book and that they had probably had lawyers review the book as well.”
Over in House & Home, Green’s story idea was assigned to Mimi Read, a well-respected freelancer based in New Orleans. Read flew to Eugene and spent five hours with “Jones.” Read did not approach the story skeptically because the assignment had come from The Times, giving it built-in credibility, and because it was “an at-home-with story, which I understood to be a single-source story.”
Jones was convincing, Read said. “She spun out this reality full of details,” including the stories of gang members in photos around the house.
In other words, these stenographers believe what their mothers tell them.
What's so galling from the perspective of a 50-something apprentice curmudgeon is that this fake would have been so easy to catch--as Hoyt's column clearly points out--if someone had just done the very basic thing journalists are supposed to do: Check it out.
I suppose there are all kinds of excuses. I've yet to hear one that absolves journalists of their responsibility to practice journalism (assuming that's what they intend to practice).
[Ed. Note: Yes, I'm being harsh. Too harsh? I don't know. Any human system is vulnerable to human assumptions. And it is just not possible to publish a newspaper, even a great one with top professionals, and get everything right all the time. We all get fooled. But I am very concerned that journalism is losing the thing that makes it journalism--a discipline of verification.]
Posted by acline at March 16, 2008 9:24 AM | | Spotlight