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Stretching the truth
Accounts of lies, plagiarism and fabrication put a glaring spotlight on the nation's press

By Michael Hill
Sun Staff
Originally published March 28, 2004

IN LESS THAN a year, two major national newspapers have devoted pages of their main news sections to special reports-not on the war on terrorism or the war in Iraq or the presidential race - but on their own egregious mistakes.

In May, it was The New York Times, one of the country's most respected newspapers, explaining how reporter Jayson Blair had deceived readers. This month, it was USA Today, the nation's most widely circulated newspaper, explaining how foreign correspondent Jack Kelley invented stories from locales around the globe.

The USA Today revelation came as Blair was publicizing his book, Burning Down My Master's House, about how he fooled the Times and its readers. And it came on top of numerous reports of falsehoods, plagiarism and misrepresentations in newspapers across the land - Chicago, Macon, Ga., Orlando, Fla. It comes a few years after The New Republic magazine fired a young reporter, Stephen Glass, for fabricating stories.

"Until recently, I have been saying the questions of if there is a crisis in journalism are a little overblown, that what we have been doing is a much better job of catching cheaters," says Tom Kunkel, dean of the journalism school at the University of Maryland, College Park, which Blair and Kelley attended. "But now I'm beginning to think that there really is something more organic going on."

This new generation of cheaters is working in a changing profession as technology provides the increased pressure of a 24-hour news cycle and increased rewards of visibility and celebrity. Both might be to blame.

"In the kind of competitive pressure we are working in now, the pressure is on to gather a larger and larger audience, to compete with more and more niche competitors, many of whom dive straight to the bottom, whose values and standards are the lowest possible," says Bill Kovach, chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists. "If the pressure is too strong and the character is too weak, you are going to have people do what Jack Kelley did."

Lee Wilkins, who teaches ethic courses at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, agrees. "I think we are all being driven, whether in print or broadcast, to make things more interesting, more lively, more vibrant," Wilkins says. "Any time you start piling on those kinds of adjectives, there is a lot of temptation to, as they say in the TV biz, sex it up. There are a lot of ways to do that and one of them is adding a lot of rich detail. The problem is you better be right. ...

"That's the kind of thing I see my students attempting to do, but they are doing it without a good grasp of how much research, how much work, has to go into getting that kind of detail. These are students with good moral compasses, but I see them making these artistic leaps that are fraught with chances to be wrong, to be spectacularly wrong."

Ben Bagdikian, former dean of the graduate school of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, says correspondents like Kelley are especially tempted. "When you are out in the field as a foreign correspondent, dealing with an audience back home that doesn't know anything about the area, you are on your own pretty much in a very exotic setting, and a writing a story that is not about meat and potatoes, not about foreign policy, but about color and drama, you have a great opportunity for embellishing stories," Bagdikian says.

Technology makes stars

The new technology also means that what were once fairly anonymous ink-stained wretches can be blow-dried stars. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were instrumental in that change. All the President's Men, their 1975 book - and the subsequent movie - about their reporting of Watergate for The Washington Post, made journalists into celebrities.

Kovach, who was chief of Washington bureau of The New York Times and top editor at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, notes the change.

"A lot of people were attracted to journalism after that time, some for the wrong reason," he says. "They wanted it to be about them, not about journalism. They wanted to be some sort of celebrity."

Janet Cooke might have been the harbinger of today's troubles. She worked at Woodward and Bernstein's newspaper and confessed to making up "Jimmy's World," the story of an 8-year-old heroin addict that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981. Her deed stunned the trade.

In the past two decades, celebrity opportunities available to journalists have increased exponentially.

"If you become a celebrity, all kinds of goodies go along with that - television, big lecture fees, a lot of gratification outside of your print reporting," says Bagdikian. "These rewards, monetary and egotistical, became rewards that went far beyond the traditional reward of being well thought of by your professional peers."

That increased visibility also reveals flaws which might have passed unnoticed in previous generations.

"I've been around this business for almost 50 years," says Kovach, one of the editors who supervised the investigation of Kelley's USA Today articles. "There have been frauds and cheats almost everywhere I have been. But in the past, they were squeezed out or eased out or they might have even hung around. There were not the kind of disclosures that you see today."

It used to be that made-up - or at least quite slanted - stories were the norm. William Randolph Hearst sent his reporters off to Cuba to hype American involvement in that island's revolt against Spain because a war was a way to sell more papers.

Changes in 1920s

"It was not until the 1920s that you really get the notion of professional journalists, the way we think about them today," says Michael Delli Carpini, dean of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. "A lot of different schools of journalism started, codes of ethics were developed, the whole notion of the journalist as objective came into play .... of standing outside the story, telling both sides, of being factual rather than opinionated."

An important document in this process was the Hutchins Commission report. Financed by Henry Luce and chaired by University of Chicago President Robert Hutchins, the 1947 report set the agenda for the country's news outlets as the growing importance of radio and the advent of television was changing the media landscape much as the Internet and cable television are today.

For the most part, it was not reporters breaking the rules on fairness and objectivity that caused the current troubles. Their violations are not based in bias, but in dishonesty.

For whatever reason, the trust that people have in the press is declining. A recent report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found: "Americans think journalists are sloppier, less professional, less moral, less caring, more biased, less honest about their mistakes and generally more harmful to democracy than they did in the 1980s. ... The public believes that news organizations are operating largely to make money and that the journalists who work for these organizations are primarily motivated by professional ambition and self-interest."

Today's journalists emerge from a culture where plagiarism is harder to define as musicians are "sampling" songs, and the Internet allows anyone to cut-and-paste virtually anything and provides access to free music, free books, free newspapers, free digital anything.

"Our culture really is to some extent at sea about what it means to borrow something, to borrow something with permission, to commit outright fabrication or to just plain steal," says Wilkins.

Lying and cheating are not necessarily condemned.

"The culture that derides Jayson Blair on the one hand also helps propagate him," says Kunkel. "They give him several million dollars in free publicity for his book even as they slap him around. Today it doesn't matter if you are famous or infamous, they put you on TV."

A movie about Stephen Glass' misdeeds, Shattered Glass, has just been released on DVD.

"It's a culture where the means don't matter, it's the ends that matter," Kunkel says. "In the Survivor culture, in the Apprentice culture, you're a fool if you're a nice guy. ... People are always trying to game the system. The only thing that people seem to care about is who wins. Jack [Kelley] won. He got the big stories. Jayson won. He made the national staff."

'Reality' television

Survivor and Apprentice are examples of "reality" television, a description that demonstrates that determining what is and isn't "real" - or news - has become more elusive.

"We have developed all kinds of soft news, semi-news, talk shows, commentary, that are sort of news, but not clearly news in the traditional way," says Carpini. "That puts professionals in a situation where the answers to questions like 'What is a journalist?' and 'What are the rules of journalism?' are not nearly so clear as they used to be."

The original Hutchins Commission included theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger and poet Archibald MacLeish. Carpini says that if a similar commission was convened today, he would include people like comedians Jon Stewart and Bill Maher whose political-based humor might be informing the public as much as the network news broadcasts.

"The genres that we've used for years to distinguish between entertainment and news are not nearly so clear anymore," Carpini says. "At some point we have got to think of the media environment even beyond journalism. What are the ways we are making decisions about informing the public?"

Kunkel says something should be done.

"We have to get our hands around what is going on here and move to stop whatever it is that might be at work," he says. "All we really have here is trust, the only real thing the consumer is buying from us is trust, that they believe what we're telling them. If we have many more of these sorts of things, then we really are going to have a crisis on our hands, if we don't already."