Nothing But the Truth?
The cases of Stephen Glass and Patricia Smith are being lumped together--two journalists caught lying by their employers, the New Republic and the Boston Globe.
But each represents a different problem for American journalism, already struggling with credibility ratings somewhere between those of used-car dealers and serial killers.
Glass is an example of what can happen because of the Washington buzz factor. The New Republic found that Glass had fabricated all or part of at least 27 of 41 articles he wrote for the magazine in the past 2 years. The 20-something Glass made a name for himself quickly, partly because of his output (huge) but mostly because of the startling stories he turned up that nobody else seemed to have. One of the most memorable was the tale of drunken young conservatives humiliating a homely woman at a Washington hotel. Ten or 15 years ago, the pages of the New Republic were filled with sober reports or analyses of social problems by earnest scholars and journalists. Geraldo-ized articles were unknown. But this is the age of celebrity TV journalists who are better known than most of the politicians they cover. The New Republic is a serious magazine. It's also a prime platform from which to launch a Washington celebrity career. But you have to create buzz as quickly as possible, and one way to do th
Glass is an extreme case. He filled notebooks with phantom interviews and even created an Internet Web site to document one of his fictional stories. The major lesson is that Washington journalism has changed. In the old days, political magazines just assumed that their writers were basically honest. But they can't do that any longer. The rewards for cutting corners are just too great.
Almost the truth. Smith, 42, who wrote a popular twice-weekly metro column for the Boston Globe, was asked to resign after admitting that she made up parts of four recent columns. A finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, Smith told dramatic and emotional stories of everyday life in the Boston area. She admitted making up almost entirely a column about "Claire," a woman dying of cancer. In addition, she created a woman named Dorothy Gibson in a column about a little girl's celebration of Easter, and a man named Jim Burke, a worker putting up barricades at the Boston Marathon.
Like Glass, Smith wanted her writing to come across as exciting. "I wanted the pieces to jolt, to be talked about, to leave the reader indelibly impressed," she wrote in her apology to readers, admitting that she sometimes quoted nonexistent people in order to "create the desired impact or slam home a salient point."
The Globe's ombudsman, Jack Thomas, took a sour view of this explanation. He wrote: "Although Smith's column of apology was written with her customary flair, she continued to compromise the truth. Making up an entire column of fictitious people and fictitious quotations is not, as she would have us believe, slamming home a point. It's lying."
But Smith apparently doesn't think of it as lying. She wrote: "I will survive this knowing that the heart of my columns was honest and heartfelt." This is a somewhat ambiguous sentence, but it seems to be a claim that emotional truth (the stuff of fiction) justifies or excuses fictional techniques in a column. One media critic, Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, read Smith's statement that way. "You get the sense reading her apology that she has the mentality of an artist who's talking about the truth with a capital T," he said. "But journalism is fundamentally about nonfiction."
What makes this interesting is that so much journalism today has turned away from the old ideal of objectivity. Many reporters accept the currently fashionable postmodern theory that objective knowledge of any sort is a myth. (A couple of years ago, I gave a speech at a convention of young journalists, and when I talked about the ideal of objectivity a mildly exasperated rumble of dissent swept through the room.)
The postmodernists put quotation marks around words like reality and push their disciples to embrace the principle of subjectivity. One of the teachings is that there is no fixed history--history is created in the minds of historians. It is what historians choose to make of the past. Journalism often seems to come under this heading, too. Since objectivity has been declared a myth, journalism is inherently a subjective exercise in which the feelings and will of the journalist function to create the truth of what has just occurred.
"Throughout our culture," the critic Michiko Kakutani writes, "the old notions of 'truth' and 'knowledge' are in danger of being replaced by the new ones of 'opinion,' 'perception,' and 'credibility.' " At the least, we are living in a docudrama culture in which the techniques of fiction and nonfiction are beginning to blur. That's why Patricia Smith's defense of her emotional honesty is more alarming than the straightforward faking of Stephen Glass.
This story appears in the July 6, 1998 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.