To: John Honderich
From: The Ombud
Re Lessons
No doubt you’ve read about frauds and deceptions perpetrated upon The New York Times by an error-prone reporter, Jayson Blair, 27.
Blair’s career is toast. And media observers are asking why bosses at a great newspaper missed so many warning signals and didn’t catch him sooner.
His nearly four years of fabrications and plagiarism, sometimes on sensitive stories, have scarred The Times’ reputation, plunging it into painful self-examination.
As a onetime Star reporter in Washington, D.C., you recall a 1981 debacle that scarred the reputation of another respected paper, The Washington Post.
At The Post, deceptions by reporter Janet Cooke, 26, weren’t exposed until she won a Pulitzer Prize for a bogus story about “Jimmy,” an 8-year-old heroin addict who existed in her mind.
A phone call from Vasser College revealed she hadn’t graduated. Nor could she speak French, Italian or Portuguese. Worst of all, Cooke couldn’t lead her bosses to “Jimmy’s” house.
The Post surrendered the Pulitzer in disgrace. It published a scathing, 14,000-word report by ombudsman Bill Green on the sordid affair an echo of last Sunday’s 14,500-word, staff-written piece in The Times.
I don’t believe any daily is immune to fraud or debacles. So what can the Star learn from these nightmares?
This is one of many dailies now refitting to serve a younger demographic. If papers don’t lure younger readers, the reasoning goes, there will be no one to replace the aging corps of baby boomers as they head for the final curtain.
Understandably, the Star wants to recruit and promote young journalists, especially women and visible minorities. They refresh the paper, and make it more representative of new Toronto.
But, please, don’t push the kids too hard, pamper, or promote them too fast in a competitive newsroom environment. If you do, you invite failure, flameouts, and public embarrassment.
The pressure on the Star to do good work is even more intense now that readers can plug into the Internet and instantly scrutinize and compare media performances on a global scale.
Superstars aren’t created overnight. It takes years for reporters to assemble the tools they need to do the job right.
Point 2: It’s nice to stress writing and storytelling skills. But is the Star doing enough to ensure all reporters and editors know and follow basic rules of good journalism?
I’m not sure, and that bothers me.
If reporters learn it’s all right to use unnamed sources freely because editors won’t challenge them, there’s trouble ahead.
If editors routinely “borrow” quotations from other media outlets or wire services without attribution, as happened twice here recently, won’t reporters start doing the same thing?
If stories too often are rushed into print, without adequate checking, awful consequences will surely follow.
The Star’s Policy Manual, whose introduction you wrote in 1993, sets out standards of conduct. But not enough newsroom employees are familiar with the manual, or have a user-friendly, printed copy. I’d bet some freelance contributors have never seen one.
This week, managing editor Mary Deanne Shears agreed to have the manual reprinted and made available. That’s a good start. This is a chance to profit from others’ misfortunes. Let’s look a little harder at ourselves.
