inside the glass house

Hang the reporter who cooks up scoop
NEW YORK-- Doctors, according to an anonymous wit, bury their mistakes. Lawyers hang them. But journalists put theirs on the front page-- and in bold type.
The National Enquirer, a supermarket tabloid specialising in Hollywood sleaze and juicy political gossip, is the highest circulated weekly newspaper in the US, a sad reflection of average American intelligence.

But most of its front-page stories are so recklessly weird and outlandishly eye-catching (headline: "2000 year old mummy wakes up-- and bites scientist") that they are known to be the product of a highly fertilized imagination (headline: "Woman Disappears Behind Coral Head, Later Gives Birth to 10 Pound Octobaby"). On the other hand, newspapers like the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times, have longstanding reputations for maintaining the highest standards of journalistic ethics-- whatever that means.

But last week the world of American journalism was jolted by the story of a 27-year-old Afro-American reporter, Jayson Blair, who fabricated more than 36 stories he wrote for the New York Times in his brief 20-month-old journalistic career. The Times woke up one morning with egg on its face. In a 14,000-word piece last Sunday, the Times chronicled in great detail how its editors were taken for a ride by a reporter who cooked up quotes, concocted interviews and plagiarised from other newspapers.

Blair was so skilled in his grand deception that he used some of the tools of modern technology to fool his editors with stories datelined Washington, West Virginia and Cleveland-- when in reality he never left his New York apartment.

A cellphone and a laptop computer helped hide his whereabouts giving the impression that he was on the road -- while he was really emailing his stories closeted in his apartment hundreds of miles away from the scene of his news stories.

The Times, which has won scores of Pulitzer Prizes for excellence in journalism, is under fire from other reporters who are demanding the resignation of some of the top editors in the newspaper. Although there were warning signals about Blair's "sloppy" reporting, he was able to slip through the cracks.

At the other extreme are weekly and monthly magazines which have battalions of "fact checkers" who, as the name implies, check every doubtful facet of information before rushing into print. Virtually every major magazine -- including Time, Newsweek, People, Vogue, and Vanity Fair -- double check their facts. The New Yorker magazine, which has a reputation for distinguished reporting, has about 15 fact checkers.

If, for example, a colour piece written by a freelancer on the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, provides a detailed description of the inner sanctum of the temple, a fact-checker will be on the phone talking to the custodians just to make sure that the colour of the inner walls really reflects the descriptive language in the article.

Last year the New York Times quoted a European journalist as saying that Americans are too obsessed with fact checking. Jokingly, he said that a fact-checker poring over a story on France would routinely call someone in the French capital and ask: "Is it true that Paris is the capital of France?"

Journalists are known, at onetime or another, to use quotes attributing them to "highly placed" or "anonymous" sources-- mostly because of time constraints, rigid deadlines or to protect their sources.

A cartoon in an American magazine last year showed a clutch of reporters talking to a maid in an outer kitchen of the White House -- and then dashing off to write a story which began with the lead: "Sources close to the White House said....."

There is also the story of American journalists who "parachute" into a foreign country and file stories peppered with quotes from unnamed "Western diplomats". But it is a well known fact that the first impressions these journalists get on arrival are not from "Western diplomats" but from taxi drivers who take them from the airport to the hotel.

Ernest Corea, a former editor of the Daily News and ex-Sri Lankan Ambassador to the US, recounts the story of a senior Observer reporter who was asked to solicit the views of "the man and the woman-in-the-street" about the election of Sri Lanka as chairman of the then-prestigious Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in the early 1970s. The next day the Observer ran a front page story with half a dozen Sri Lankans glorifying Sri Lanka's leadership in one of the powerful third world movements at that time.

But there was one problem. The reporter had fabricated all of the quotes, and worse still, the names of those who were supposedly interviewed had been fished out of the previous day's obituary notices in the Daily News -- proving that dead men and dead women do tell tales after all.

And a British reporter once paid a price for staying far ahead of his story when the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) led a secretive coup in 1953 to oust the democratically elected head of Iran, Mohamed Mossadegh.

Mossadegh, who had nationalised the country's oil companies threatening US and British oil interests, was toppled in a CIA-inspired "regime change" which brought an American puppet, the Shah of Iran, to the peacock throne.

With rumours floating around town that Mossadegh was to be executed, the British reporter jumped the gun trying to outscoop his colleagues. But when the execution did not take place as reported in the British press, the editor of the newspaper sent a frantic cable to his reporter in Tehran which read: "If Mossadegh doesn't hang by Friday, you will."

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