When the News Proves to Be Fiction

Journalists are not thin-skinned,” the great columnist Murray Kempton said, “they have no skins.” That explains the yelping outrage of the Washington media to the obviously sensible criticism by publisher-writer Steven Brill of coverage of the Monica Lewinsky episode. Journalists who have advanced their careers by blasting the reputations of others while presuming the right to intrude on anyone else’s privacy now cry foul when their tactics become the subject of penetrating inquiry.

But Brill’s main point is incontrovertible: The reliance on unnamed sources led the media to heap error upon error while reporting any rumors as true as long as a reporter claimed to have a source for the information.

Brill is not alone in sounding the alarm about the degeneration of journalism. The Committee of Concerned Journalists, chaired by the head of Harvard’s prestigious Nieman Foundation, Bill Kovach, issued a study scathing in its conclusions on how the press covered the Clinton-Lewinsky matter. The study, conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates, examined 1,565 statements and allegations contained in reporting by mainstream media journalists over the first six days of the crisis beginning last January. Among the conclusions of the committee’s report: “A large percentage of the reportage had no sourcing.”

Once-revered practices of journalism--avoiding not-for-attribution quotes and never printing information from only one source--are often overlooked by editors in today’s overheated competitive market. Being briefed “on background” or “off the record” once meant that you were provided a lead that had to be reliably confirmed before printing; now it is a license for fantasy.

The crisis with present-day journalism extends beyond the Clinton-Lewinsky coverage. Take the example of Stephen Glass, a 25-year-old reporter for the New Republic, who wrote at least 27 stories based on sources that were not only unnamed but nonexistent. Glass’s fictionalized accounts were so dazzling that George, Harper’s and Rolling Stone also printed his work; the New York Times Magazine yanked one of his stories at the last moment after the scandal broke.

Glass is an example of the new breed of journalist valued for the ability to satiate the lust for gossip that dominates the news industry. Without any track record, Glass was able to rise from the ranks of fact checker to New Republic senior editor and star writer because his fibs fed the Washington gossip mill.

The problem is to be found throughout the media in the widespread acceptance of unnamed sources as the basis for stories. Indeed the most compelling, even prize-winning journalism, has been based on fictionalized sourcing.

Just last week, the Boston Globe, a respected paper owned by the New York Times Co., revealed that its columnist Patricia Smith, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of a 1997 American Society of Newspaper Editors distinguished writing award, invented a dying cancer patient whose compelling story she told. Not quite as compelling as the story made up by former Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke that won the Pulitzer some years ago. In both cases, the now-common use of pseudonyms abetted the deception.

There may be some value in protecting the identity of sources, and most of us journalists have used them in the pursuit of important stories. But it is time to admit that the utility afforded by this device is far outweighed by the opportunity for deception that unnamed sources afford.

The problem is compounded when illegal government leaks become the subject of investigation, as is alleged in the case of Kenneth Starr’s office. Reporters may then be accomplices in covering up official malfeasance. As former Newsweek Washington correspondent Jim Doyle asks in the current issue of Nieman Reports magazine, “Are news organizations willing participants in a cover-up?”

The traditional defense of journalists has been that the greater good of enlightening the public is served by access to inside information, particularly from officials. But the reality is that leaks by government sources are more often the basis of manipulation and even lying rather than truth seeking.

The common practice of reporting information from anonymous sources is a bargain with the devil that undermines the open, informed debate required of a democratic society. It has become pervasive not because it serves the public interest but because it provides raw meat for the feeding frenzy that now passes for journalism.