I was just thinking
. . .
ABOUT MEDIA ETHICS, FAME, AND FEEDING FRENZIES
By Bill Kirtz
Thoughts on being semifamous for fourteen minutes.
Well, almost that long. It happened suddenly last summer. Journalism's
self-infatuation made Barniclegate a front-page national issue-sparking
an overdue and continuing debate over reporting standards-and rendered
your humble scribe's walk-on part momentarily newsworthy.
The saga, full of Northeastern connections, started
in 1986, when Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle lifted anecdote after
anecdote, detail after detail, quote after quote from A. J. Liebling's
classic The Earl of Louisiana. I wrote the Globe about the literary larceny
and received no reply, but bored a decade of students with this "what
not to do" example.
There the matter stood until July, when I wrote
about the theft for a journalism magazine. I detailed the forced ouster
of Globe columnist Patricia Smith for inventing characters and the consequent
scrutiny Barnicle's often-doubted stories were getting-from Northeastern
journalism alum Walter Robinson, a Globe assistant managing editor.
In August, Dan Kennedy, an N.U. journalism grad,
friend, and Boston Phoenix media columnist whose pursuit of Barnicle's
spoor makes Captain Ahab look lethargic, stepped into the tale. Earlier
in the summer, during a chat about other media matters, I told Dan about
the '86 pilferage. He verified Barnicle's theft and then penned a textual
analysis of the Liebling-Barnicle connection, playing up my minor role.
The Phoenix dropped it on Globe editors preparing
to finally dump Barnicle, their fixture for twenty-five years. His unattributed
use of a series of George Carlin jokes had earlier in the month earned
him dismissal, subsequently reduced to a suspension. But when the retired
editor of Reader's Digest brought yet another unauthenticated column to
Globe honchos' attention, they had to cut him loose.
Despite the Phoenix's suggestion that the Liebling
story gave Mike the final push-the last biplane machine-gun blast that
toppled King Kong from the Empire State Building-the Globe's insistence
that it had already, if belatedly, decided to scrape off its Barnicle seems
more plausible.
Still, for one news cycle after Barnicle's forced
resignation, I was a hot media property. Lofty stuff, briefly sharing the
Huntington Avenue talking-head stratosphere with the likes of criminal
justice dean Jamie Fox and sociology prof Jack Levin ("Have mass murder,
will commentate") and law school professor and cigarette foe Richard
Daynard. I fielded calls from the Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune,
New Orleans Times-Picayune, and a host of Boston-area print and TV outlets.
My standard blend of logorrhea and disingenuousness,
which reduces middlers to deep REM sleep, seemed to please my inquisitors.
Heady times for someone whose name has been often dropped but seldom picked
up. The only level I didn't stoop to was returning Boston Herald queries.
(Why help them run up the score on the opposition?) Funny, the Globe never
called.
I emerged as a journalistic sleuth who "detected"
or "uncovered" Barnicle's word lifting. Flattering, but untrue.
I didn't exactly decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Earl of Louisiana was
an instant hit when it appeared in the New Yorker in 1961. It was printed
in hardcover, then paperback, and was then made into the 1989 Paul Newman
film, Blaze. Under the title Liebling at Home, it's been anthologized in
hard and soft cover.
All of which makes one marvel that nobody else,
inside or outside the Globe, caught either Barnicle's Liebling lifting
at the time or my magazine reference to it a month before the Phoenix story.
Did some journalistic powers that be not know, or not want to know, about
yet another example of Barnicle's malfeasance?
No matter. As our president says, let the healing
process begin! What can we learn from the sordid subject of Plagiarism
Found?
First, we newsies just adore chronicling our deeds
and misdeeds. How many trees died, how many tons of ink were spilled over
the Globe's wayward columnists? For what? Do Ralph and Rowena Reader devour
front-page (New York Times) or 3,000-word (Washington Post) autopsies of
Patty's and Mike's journalistic felonies?
Dan Kennedy thinks this national fallout proves
that self-criticism is alive and well in journalism. "We're living
in a glut of media criticism. That's not bad," he says. Not bad only
if we move beyond playing media "gotcha"-if we act to correct
our faults, not just wallow in them. People aren't interested in how we
do our job, but that we do it right.
Pulitzer Prizewinning Globe columnist Eileen
McNamara is one of the few surveying their erstwhile colleagues' sins to
question the tacit journalistic tradition that opinion writers have more
latitude with facts than any other reporter. That's what got the Globe
in trouble in the first place.
It's no secret that star columnists like Barnicle
simply haven't been edited as closely as mere newsroom commoners. Bostonians
with long memories may recall his racist screed about professional basketball
players, for example. Who took the most heat about that? The lowly copy
editor, who insisted she'd toned down his more virulent lines.
Commentators' opinions are their own. But accuracy
and authentication of sources are as vital for these editorial writers,
columnists, and reviewers as for any other journalist. It's no sin to stray
off the journalistic reservation, as long as readers know you're doing
it. If you excel at lyric prose, as does Patricia Smith, fine. If your
forte is parable, as Barnicle has lately and lamely termed his inventions,
great. Just label them as such.
Literary journalism, which uses fictional techniques
to make narrative compelling, shines in the hands of such contemporary
masters as Tracy Kidder (The Soul of a New Machine) and Mark Kramer (Invasive
Procedures). They don't fudge the facts. Other works dubbed nonfiction,
such as John Berendt's best-selling Midnight in the Garden of Good and
Evil, mislead because they invent characters and alter the sequence of
events. Call them nonfiction novels, as Norman Mailer dubbed his poetic
evocation of murderer Gary Gilmore, The Executioner's Song. Tom Wolfe's
novel Bonfire of the Vanities blends clear-eyed reportage and creative
invention to skewer Wall Street and Park Avenue strivers. Splendid. None
of these is more equal than others. Truth in packaging is all.
As the search continues for executive-office villains
at the Globe, much has been written about fact-checking, about the absurd
notion that editors should verify every line of copy before it goes to
press. A noble but impossible goal, on or off deadline. Years ago, Globe
honchos tried to ride herd on columnists, but the effort predictably failed.
Editors can't baby-sit their staffers. They have to trust them.
And any reporter, whatever his status on the editorial
food chain, who betrays that trust by plagiarism or invention should be
immediately suspended or fired, depending on the severity of the offense.
It's that simple.
The public is on to us; a recent Harris poll showed
journalism ranking lowest in their esteem-behind even lawyers. We won't
win back their trust by talking about credibility, but by being credible.
We won't regain public respect by endless discussion-and then repetition-of
our sins, from Princess Dianaism to Monicagate to the Globies' inventioneers.
We'll do it by firing scribblers who invent or steal.
Many journalists like to consider themselves professionals.
If you talk the talk, walk the walk. A profession has a code of conduct,
standards, ethics. If we're not prepared to subscribe to the basic tenets
of honesty, and punish those who violate them, let's spare ourselves and
the public the "professional" pretense.
One journalistic code, alas, is never broken:
little guys in academia get one burst of the limelight, then it's back
to the two-hour-a-day, three-day-a-week classroom grind. No new Lexis-Nexis
mentions (not that I'm looking, you understand). No snapping to attention
when I enter the room. No friends' queries about whether they're good enough
to dine with me.
Yep. My phone has stopped ringing. Perhaps the
cops on the media beat are too busy discussing the journalistic "ethics"
of Salon, the Internet magazine that boasts it's "descending to the
gutter tactics that we deplore." Or deconstructing Roseanne's justification
for offering Monica Lewinsky $1 millionplus to appear on her new TV
talk show: "I don't feel like I'm a journalist. Fortunately for me,
I have no integrity."
Roseanne's overrating our "profession."
Give her a Linda Trippmodel tape recorder. It is absolutely authentic.
Depending on what "is" is, that is.
Bill Kirtz is an associate professor in the
School of Journalism. His opinions appear regularly in "Talk of the
Gown."
Return to top of
page