Fabricated From the Byline Up, Four Scandals That Shamed Elite Newsrooms

Imagine hiring a contractor who builds beautiful houses, wins awards for them, and turns out to have drawn some of the houses on paper without ever pouring a foundation. The inspectors were charmed. The neighbours admired the porches. The only thing missing was a house. That, in a sentence, is the story of four reporters at four of the most respected publications in the country, and the editors who loved their work too well to look underneath it.

I am not going to tell you that every journalist is a fabricator. They are not, and the profession has plenty of honest people who check things three times and sweat over a comma. I am going to tell you that the four cases below share a pattern, that the pattern is institutional rather than personal, and that you can learn to spot the conditions that produce it. I will use only what each publication itself found and released. Where I do not know a detail with certainty, I leave it out.

Case one: the boy who did not exist

On September 28, 1980, the Washington Post published "Jimmy's World" on its front page. The author was Janet Cooke, a young reporter on the Post's metropolitan staff. The story described an eight-year-old heroin addict in the District of Columbia, living with his mother's boyfriend, who injected him. It was vivid, harrowing, and written with a novelist's eye. It was also, as events proved, made up.

The reaction was immediate and public. City officials, including the mayor, were alarmed, and the police began searching for the child. The Post declined to give the child's identity, saying that it had promised to protect its source. Think about that for a moment. A newspaper was, in effect, telling the city government that it knew of a small boy being injected with heroin and would not say where he was. That is an odd position for a paper to defend even if the boy were real. It was a position that only made sense if the editors had stopped asking the one question that mattered, which was whether they had seen the child.

In April 1981 the Post's story won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. Then the biography began to fray. When the winner's biographical details were checked, her résumé did not hold up: a newspaper in her home state flagged that her claims about her degrees were false. Confronted by her editors, she admitted that Jimmy was a composite or an invention, and the Post told the world on April 15, 1981, that the prize was being returned. The paper's ombudsman, Bill Green, published a long account of what went wrong on the Post's own front page.

What went wrong, he found, was in part a shortage of the most basic reporting by the editors. Nobody ever produced the boy. A good tale had arrived with a nice voice and a good beginning, and the editors, to their credit as people and to their discredit as editors, believed it.

Case two: the writer who got better the less he checked

Stephen Glass was a young star at The New Republic in the 1990s, producing funny, lurid, perfectly shaped features about political life and its odd corners. In May 1998 the magazine ran "Hack Heaven," a piece about a teenage computer hacker who had supposedly been hired by the software company he had breached, a company called Jukt Micronics. A reporter at the online publication of Forbes, Adam Penenberg, tried to follow up the story and could not find the company. He could not find the hacker. He found a voicemail, a website and a few other trappings of a business that, as far as anyone could tell, did not exist.

Penenberg published his findings. The editor of The New Republic, Charles Lane, began checking, and the invented company's trail led back to Glass, who had gone to some trouble to cover it: a fake website, a made-up voicemail, a brother pretending to be a source. Glass was fired. The magazine reviewed his body of work and found that a large portion of his published pieces, most of them by its count, contained material he had invented. Other magazines that had printed him ran their own reviews.

There is something instructive in how it worked. Glass was caught not by his own editors' routine process but by an outsider who was curious about a single story. The routine process was the check by the magazine's fact-checkers, who relied on what the writer gave them: notes, phone numbers, names of sources. A fabricator who supplies the documents for the check is, in effect, grading his own homework. The checker had good manners and no skepticism, and the writer supplied a story the magazine liked.

To the magazine's lasting credit, Lane handled the matter openly and published the corrections. A magazine is judged by what it does when it finds the rot.

Case three: the national correspondent who stayed home

Jayson Blair joined the New York Times as an intern in 1998 and rose to a national reporting beat, writing in 2002 and 2003 about the sniper shootings in the Washington area and about the families of soldiers in the Iraq war. His datelines placed him in Maryland, Texas, Ohio and elsewhere. For a number of those stories, he was, in fact, at home in New York, working from his apartment and relying on photographs and phone calls and the work of other reporters.

The Times learned of it when an editor at a Texas newspaper, the San Antonio Express-News, complained that a Blair story about the family of a missing soldier had lifted passages from a reporter at her paper. Blair resigned on May 1, 2003. Ten days later, on May 11, the Times published a long front-page account of its own failure. It reported that, in the months it reviewed, Blair's work had been marked by fabrication, plagiarism and false datelines, with problems found in at least thirty-six of the seventy-three national stories examined.

The editors who had trusted him took the consequences. The executive editor, Howell Raines, and the managing editor, Gerald Boyd, resigned on June 5, 2003. The paper's own account examined how its controls had failed. A young reporter with a good manner and a record of producing copy had been promoted past his reliability, and the paper's normal controls had not stopped the slide.

This is the one the profession has argued about longest, because it was the Times, and because of the claim that Blair had been favoured. I do not need to settle that debate. The unambiguous finding is that the paper's checks failed, and that its management said so at length on page one, a thing worth noting about the Times that we should praise when we are being fair.

Case four: the foreign correspondent with the best stories

Jack Kelley was a longtime USA Today foreign correspondent, a Pulitzer finalist, and the paper's reporter in war zones and capitals. He produced vivid stories from the Middle East, Kosovo and elsewhere. In January 2004 Kelley resigned as the paper investigated his work.

The paper's review team, monitored by three veteran journalists from outside the paper, reported in March 2004 that Kelley had fabricated substantial portions of at least eight major stories, and it found that he had written scripts to help others mislead the people checking his work. A fuller report from the outside panel followed in April. Kelley denied the findings. The paper's editor, Karen Jurgensen, resigned in April 2004.

What stands out in the USA Today case is the long gap between success and scrutiny. The more dramatic and exotic the story, the less likely an editor in Virginia is to check it, because the reporter is the only person who was there. A foreign correspondent's dispatch is among the hardest things in journalism to verify, and so it depends on the one thing that cannot be audited: the reporter's honesty.

The pattern, in numbered premises

I promised you an argument, so here it is. These four cases are not four unrelated accidents. They share five conditions, and I count them off the way a lawyer counts the elements of a claim.

1. The writer was a star. Cooke won the Pulitzer. Glass was the magazine's most-talked-about voice. Blair was promoted. Kelley was a finalist. Prestige is a kind of credit, and editors extend credit to the people who bring in the clips. When trust is generous, checking looks rude.
2. The story was too good. Each fabrication had perfect structure: the child in a world of horror, the teenager outsmarting a corporation, the grieving family, the shrewd observer on the scene. Real life is untidy. Real people say dull things. When a story's quotes sound like a screenwriter's, that is a reason to look harder, not a reason to run it.
3. The check relied on the writer. Phone numbers and names came from the person being checked. A fact-checking system that uses the reporter's own source list is testing consistency, not truth.
4. The conclusion pleased the room. A story that fits a publication's view of the world, or its self-image as the paper that finds the hidden outrage, gets less resistance. I will return to that point in a moment.
5. Doubters were slow to be heard. In more than one case, colleagues had doubts that did not travel upward, or that were met with defensiveness. Newsrooms rank by status, and a junior person's doubt about a star's story is a short and lonely walk.

Those five are not a partisan list. They describe a vulnerability that exists at the Post, at the Times, at a magazine with a dozen staff, and at a conservative site with a fast clip of items. A newsroom on any part of the spectrum can be fooled by a star telling it what it wants to hear.

The best objection

The strongest defence of the profession goes like this. Four scandals in four decades, out of the millions of stories that reputable outlets print, is a remarkably clean record. And in every case the institution itself investigated, published its findings and punished the guilty, which is exactly how a self-correcting system should work. If you find this alarming, the defenders say, you are comparing journalism to a standard of perfection that no human institution can meet.

I accept most of that. Four cases are not a verdict on a profession, and I am not claiming they are. It is true that the Post, the New Republic, the Times and USA Today all investigated and published, and I have said so, because it matters. Self-correction is a virtue and ought to be credited.

But the defence does not answer the questions I care about. First, a fabricator is a rare event only if the system for catching fabricators is good, and in each case the system did not catch the problem; an outsider, a rival or a complaining colleague did. Second, the cases we know are the ones that were caught. The reader of any paper has no way to know how many embellished quotes survived, because the failure mode is, by design, invisible. Third, the conditions that allowed the scandals, a pleasing narrative and a trusted star, are not rare. They are the ordinary mood of a newsroom. The same conditions that let a fabricated child run on a front page also let a tilted framing run without a flag, which is a quieter version of the same failure, and which is why we spend time on Seven Words Reporters Use to Tilt a Story Without Telling a Single Lie.

The Founding angle: why Jefferson wanted both the press and a grain of salt

Thomas Jefferson is the founder most often quoted in defence of a free press, and he deserves to be, for a letter of 1787 in which he said that if he had to choose between a government without newspapers and newspapers without a government, he would not hesitate to choose the latter. But the same Jefferson, after years of being the target of the partisan papers of his day, wrote in 1807 that nothing could now be believed which is seen in a newspaper, and that truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.

Hold both thoughts. The Founders did not hold the press in awe. They protected it in the First Amendment, which says that Congress shall make no law "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press," precisely because they knew it would be flawed, opinionated and sometimes wrong, and that the remedy for such a press is a free society with its own eyes open. They never imagined a priesthood of credentialled truth-tellers whom the public would obey without checking. The citizen's scepticism is part of the constitutional design.

So when a Janet Cooke or a Jayson Blair is exposed, the right response is neither cynicism nor a call for the government to license reporters. That would hand the power to decide what is true to the very officials the press exists to watch. The right response is what the Post, the Times and the others eventually did: more disclosure, more checking, and public correction. The citizen's part is to read with an open mind and a pencil.

What readers can do with this

Here is a short checklist, drawn from the four cases, for anyone who wants to be a harder target for a good story.

• Look for anonymous sources that carry the whole weight. A claim that rests on a single unnamed person is only as good as the outlet's checking. See Anonymous Sources, Who Gets Them and What a Reader Should Demand.
• Distrust the perfect quote. A line that sounds like it was written for a movie poster might have been.
• Ask what could be checked. If a person, a place or an organisation in a story cannot be located by anyone, that is a flag.
• Follow the corrections. A publication that investigates itself in public deserves more trust than one that stays silent. The Corrections Page Is the Most Honest Part of the Paper, So Read It shows how.
• Look at the record of a single case at a time. The night CBS aired the Guard memos is a companion study in The Night a Network Bet Its Reputation on Memos Typed Like a Word File.

For a longer view of how mainstream editors handled a different kind of trust, the story of a Pulitzer-winning correspondent in the Soviet Union is told in Walter Duranty's Pulitzer and the Famine the New York Times Did Not See. The media watch page tracks stories as they change.

The case in brief

1. Janet Cooke's invented child in 1980, Stephen Glass's invented company in 1998, Jayson Blair's invented datelines in 2003 and Jack Kelley's fabricated reports ending in 2004 were four different frauds with one shared weakness.
2. In every case a star writer, a story too good to check and a verification system that relied on the writer let the invention through, and an outsider or a colleague finally caught it.
3. The institutions deserve credit for investigating and publishing their findings; they do not deserve credit for the checks that failed beforehand.
4. The Founders' answer was a free press and a sceptical citizen, not a government licence to decide what is true.
5. A reader who learns the conditions, the perfect quote, the sole source and the star with no editor, can see the next case coming.

What you can do: pick one story you shared lately, find the original reporting, and check whether the key person or document is named well enough that someone else could confirm it.