When the Media Fakes It

The press is having a hard time holding its head up these days. Case in point: the recent unpaid commercial endorsement of the Bush administration that passed for coverage of the invasion of Iraq.

The level of mistrust has risen so high that an entire website (mediahorse.com) has been devoted to taking "an unbiased, in-depth look at the vast myriad of whores who call themselves 'journalists.'" This site "casts a garish spotlight on the relentless screaming heads of television, the babbling paranoids of squawk radio, and the crayon scribblings of lazy print media 'journalists.'" The website "set out to bring the media to their knees, but found they were already there."

Worse yet, journalists have to contend with fellow writeers who make far more than they do -- the fiction writer who makes up stories for a living or the screenwriter who inflates other people's words to cinematic proportions for a living. Neither of them has to come up with new ideas every day, chase down leads, develop sources, quote with impeccable accuracy, respect confidentiality of off-the-record information, or avoid libel suits. And yet, each of them earns well into the seven figures a year, while most journalists' salaries, except for a few luminaries and network anchors, hover right around the public assistance level.

All of which might lead you to the conclusion that making things up for a living is easier and more lucrative than telling the truth. In fact, disgraced "New Republic" journalist Stephen Glass plays on this theme in an "autobiographical novel" about his misadventures in creative writing called "The Fabulist," due out in bookstores this week. Which may begin to explain the motives of Jayson Blair, a seemingly gifted and extraordinarily fortunate young reporter for the New York Times, who created his own bizarre twist on "all the news fit to print."

On May 2, the New York Times announced the resignation of Mr. Blair, a national affairs reporter whose Apr. 26 front-page article about an Army mechanic missing in Iraq included "passages similar to some appearing earlier in the San Antonio Express-News." The Times apologized to the family of the missing mechanic, Specialist Edward Anguiano, who has since been reported dead, for "heightening their pain in time of mourning." The Times also apologized to its readers for its "grave breach of its journalistic standards" and said that the editors "had been unable to determine what original reporting (Mr. Jayson) did to produce" that story.

According to a 7000 word mea culpa that ran in the May 11 edition of the Times, an "internal investigation into Blair's tenure at the paper uncovered a long history of falsified stories that appeared in the newspaper. Jayson Blair...misled readers and Times colleagues with dispatches that purported to be from Maryland, Texas and other states, when often he was far away, in New York. He fabricated comments. He concocted scenes. He lifted material from other newspapers and wire services. He selected details from photographs to create the impression he had been somewhere or seen someone, when he had not." At least 36 of the 73 articles written by Blair had "problems with accuracy, or were outright falsifications."

Mr. Blair now joins the ignominious ranks of former Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke, the Boston Globe's Patricia Smith and Mike Barnacle, and Slate's Jay Forman, all journalists who were caught embellishing, plagiarizing, and flat out lying in print.

Conflating fact and fiction, embroidering the truth, and, in general, floating through life on Cliff Notes, cuts across disciplines, with academics and scientists inventing data, as well. Last year, Emory University history Michael A. Bellesiles resigned following an investigation of charges that he concocted evidence to support his book "Arming America," and Bell Labs fired researcher Jan Hendrik Schon when it discovered he made up scientific data and published it. And lest we forget, last year noted historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose were forced to acknowledge that they "borrowed" freely from primary sources without accreditation, a costly error that got Mrs. Goodwin kicked off the Pulitzer committee, but not off the Sunday morning talking-head circuit.