I didn’t realize what I was getting myself into. When I chose journalism as my major, it was because I loved news and writing, and wanted to be an instrument of the people – to help connect them with the citizens of this great, wide world. I wasn’t aware that my chosen profession is one that seems to be associated with grandstanding, pervasive lying, and consequently, a massive lack of trust.
NBC’s Brian Williams is the latest notable journalist to be accused of news fabrication. Williams was taken to task for a story he’d been telling for years: that while reporting from Iraq in 2003, his chopper came under RPG fire. Recently, service members who had been with him at the time began to cast doubt on the veracity of his statements, which caused many of his other stories to come under scrutiny, including one about seeing a body floating past his hotel in the French Quarter during his coverage of Hurricane Katrina. These criticisms arose because the area where he was staying had flooding on a much less significant level than the rest of New Orleans, and not nearly enough to cause bodies to be floating around.
To tell the truth, Williams is just the flavor of the month. The amount of manipulated facts — if not outright fabrications — in journalism is staggering. Journalists commit to following a specific code of ethics, but too many seem to think of this as less of a code, and more a list of suggestions.
Exempli gratia, Sabrina Rubin Erdely. Last November, Erdely published a piece in Rolling Stone magazine about a rape scandal on the University of Virginia campus. In her article, Erdely alleged that the young victim, whom she referred to as “Jackie,” had reached out for support and assistance in apprehending her multiple attackers, but had been rebuffed by the school’s administration. The initial public outcry condemning campus rape procedures quickly faded when, within just five days, it became clear that the story had holes in it. Erdely had not spoken to any of the men “Jackie” had accused, nor had she investigated the many discrepancies in “Jackie’s” story, the most obvious of which is that Erdely neglected to check if the frat party, where “Jackie” claimed the attack occurred, even took place. Spoiler alert: it didn’t. Within three weeks, Rolling Stone had recanted the entire story. In this case, the real loss doesn’t seem to be to journalistic methods or integrity, but to actual rape victims who will now face an even tougher road to justice.
More notorious than Erdely is Stephen Glass, a real life Pinocchio (interestingly, the two were classmates at University of Pennsylvania). This would be wunderkind reported for The New Republic between December 1995 and May 1998. Glass seemed to have a sixth sense that enabled him to spot people so unique that an entire story could be written around them. He wrote stories so unusual that one could hardly believe these characters were real (and indeed, they were not.) Glass was not a careless liar, however. To back up his completely fabricated pieces, he created fake letterheads, fake faxes, fake memos, and notes from meetings that never occurred. By the time Glass was fired from The New Republic, half of his articles were discovered to be completely or partially fabricated. Glass’s editor in chief, Charles Lane, has since stated, “I’d bet lots of the stuff in those” other articles “is fake too.” The story that ultimately brought Glass down, “Hack Heaven,” profiled a fifteen year old hacker who was hired as a security consultant by the very software firm he had previously hacked. When a reporter from Forbes magazine started looking into the story, it quickly became clear that the boy-genius who could hack an entire company’s computer system didn’t exist at all. Even more egregiously, the company in the story, Jukt Micronics, was a complete and utter fabrication. Glass’s editor-in-chief called an alleged executive at the company, who backed up the entire story; the exec turned out to be Glass’s younger brother. Glass was fired, his name deservedly dragged through the muck, and every single story he’d ever published for The New Republic scrutinized. Reading Glass’s articles, it’s clear he is a gifted writer, able to capture everyday events in a way that makes you view them differently. It seems his invention of news events wasn’t motivated by a desire to hide abysmal writing, but simply because reality wasn’t interesting enough for him.
Recently, I spoke to Sally Lehrman, a fellow at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics; together with Richard Gingras, head of Google News, she founded the Trust Project. The Trust Project aims “to create and promote tools that can bake the basics of trustworthiness –accuracy, integrity, transparency and inclusion– into news practices and platforms.”
Transparency seems to be key here. Anyone who was glued to last year’s podcast, “Serial,” witnessed, not just a feat of investigative journalism, but a triumph of transparency. Instead of all the research being done in a vacuum, away from the public, Sarah Koenig and her team invited listeners to be part of the journey, regardless of what was discovered. Allowing the audience to follow the journalistic process that precedes writing a story can help journalists establish trustworthiness.
Williams, Erdely, and Glass are just a sampling of a trend in which real journalism is replaced with story telling. So many journalists have been embroiled in fact-checking scandals that it’s hardly newsworthy anymore – rather like being shocked when politicians are found to have been lying. This is truly unfortunate, because the vast majority of journalists are ethical people who put great effort into ensuring that our news reporting is unbiased and truthful. Reporters must absorb that when they twist words, quote out of context, or just flat-out lie, they don’t merely give themselves a bad name, they do a terrible disservice to their professional community.
Ms. Lehrman had this to say about Brian Williams: “The incident has to do with poor choices on the part of an individual, and even though network anchors have always served as icons apart from the regular news process, can also be seen as a symptom of the transformation of journalists into celebrities and pundits instead of the servants of informed and democratic debate.”
It’s time for journalists to remember that they work for the people. As such, their only goal should be to state the truth about the world around them. Grandstanding, reporting with an agenda, and fabulist tales have no place in pure journalism. Let us hope that sharing the truth, whatever that may be, however boring, damaging, or inconvenient, will be the sole objective of journalists everywhere. Only then will journalism once again be worthy of those stalwarts, Cronkite and Murrow, and return to be a profession of trust and integrity.