Cape Cod Times says reporter fabricated people for stories

Mizzou, I don't know who you are, but I've read your posts for years so I know you know a lot of people in this business. I also know you bring a lot to the table as far as content on this message board. This last post of yours really smashes my belief in who we are as professionals and journalists. Simply fucking disgusting. I'd kick their ass if I knew them.

I can promise you this: I might let it slide once but I'd tell them if they ever did it again, I'd rat them out like Joe Pistone.

 

I way back when someone was supposed to be covering a San Francisco Giants game. Dude watched it on TV and made up some quotes. I think he was a longtime writer for the Sacramento Bee.

 

Note this job posting:

http://www.journalismjobs.com/Job_Listing.cfm?JobID=1456225

 

I would not blame someone for "ratting someone out" but I also understand why they wouldn't do it...

When the paper and the top bosses at times seem to be intentionally looking the other way, why, in a time when we're all about self-preservation, would we draw any unnecessary attention to yourself?

I picked up the local paper over the weekend and they had a 1A story with a local reaction to the Newton shooting where I would bet just about anything that some, or likely all of the locals who were quoted in the story don't exist. Either that, or the writer found several people very quickly who offered incredibly insightful quotes... I think seven people were quoted and all seemed "too good".

I think the most simple way to do this is whenever you have reporters quoting people who are not "celebrities or public officials or workers" especially in those dreaded "man on the street" or "reaction" stories force the reporter to provide a phone number where someone could fact check if needed... I'll be the first to admit that the editors probably wouldn't fact check, but maybe this is one way to scare reporters into not fabricating something.

That's the problem with fabrication... It's almost impossible to prove. The people who are caught are usually caught by accident.

 

You mean the quote from

I thought the quote from the VP at Jukt Micronics was very insightful.

 

The stuff about "boy these editors must have been asleep at the wheel" almost always strikes me as revisionist bullshit. Sorry, but the basic function of a news gathering operation simply will not work if every editor must begin every single story with the premise that "some of this could be fabricated, so I will check every source to see if they exist in our Nexis or Pacer public records system. Oh and by the way, I need to do it in six minutes because these pages now close at 8 pm and we're down from eight copy editors to two from five years ago." It's simply not realistic. It's one thing if you're pulling some shit like Janet Cook did at the Wash Post did with a story of a fucking 12-year-old heroin addict, and no one else has even seen the kid, there are no pics of him, and you still not only run the fucking story but submit it for a Pulitzer. That kind of thing should set off 50 alarm bells. Glass too. Those people were trying to become stars. They were lying about grand things, inventing dramatic characters and acting fuzzy about the details to make themselves look brilliant. This Cape Cod woman was just lazy, or scared to talk to actual people. She was making up banal shit. How is that ever going to raise questions about her work if she's making up boring crap that meets the minimum standard for ambition?

Here is the scary truth. Anyone who truly wanted to make up quotes could get them into publication. Even a magazine with fact checkers. (Some places ask for tapes, others just transcipts. How easy would it be to simply fake a transcript?") It really does come down to the ethics and integrity of the individual. I think its actually rarer in sports because there are more checks and balances in place. If you interview an athlete, even in a 1-on-1, and you make up a quote, the athlete has likely dealt with the media enough that he can, if he or she chooses, easily object. When Jason Blair was making shit up at the Times, some of the families said they didn't call bullshit on it because they just assumed that's what happened in stories. And they didn't know who to contact to object. Every athlete at the college or professional level knows at the best least he can tell his SID, "This isn't true. I did not say that. Produce a tape."

There is a very basic level of trust between editor and writer that HAS to exist for this whole thing to work, especially in this "Publish now; also what are you working on for tomorrow?" world. Bad people will always be able to violate that trust. As an editor, you can look for signs or do spot checks, but you're probably too busy wrangling egos, determining who to pit against one another in a Hunger Games layoff battle royale, or watching your own neck.

 

I agree that it probably happens less in sports than in other sections for the reasons that DD listed... Hell, in sports, with the obvious exceptions of preps and some smaller sports, people could not record interviews and not write down a single not and still get plenty of quotes off quote sheets, transcripts of press conferences etc... That's not usually the case with some other sections...

I don't expect an editor to fact check every quote that comes in. But it would be nice if there was some practice that could be put in place that would act as a simple deterrent. I think if they had to provide something as simple as phone numbers of the people they talked to, or at least, explain why they couldn't get the number, it would make this less likely to happen... Obviously, in the case of the truly sociopathic, fake numbers, fake transcripts, fake anything can be given out and more often than not, they're not going to be called on it...

The incident that resonates most with me where something like this likely happened was when a columnist at a paper who is now at a national site, wrote a column with a fan reaction from a game. The beat writer called me the next day and said, "I rode with him to the game, sat next to him throughout the game, walked down with him to the press conferernce afterwards and rode home with him after the game." When did he get that perfect quote from some random fan?

and then he said, "And why would he even need it in the first place?"

 

I think Mizzou posted that before ... sounds familiar. I posted this before:
Big-time writer, big-time downtown metro paper. Covered a golf tournament and wrote a sidebar about the roped off areas, something like they tried using two roped off areas and a new tier of tickets available. Pay a little more and get inside one set of ropes, others had to stay outside the other set of ropes.
The story quoted Gilda Gladrag from Podunk saying somethink like, "I think it's a great idea. I paid a little more but got to see so much more. I enjoyed going to the tournament."
Well, a guy I knew, his wife was a reporter who covered Podunk and knew Gilda Gradrag from the school board. Next meeting, she approached Gilda and asked her how she liked the golf tournament. She got a blank stare, like WTF are you talking about. Writer said, Oh, I saw that you were quoted in a story in the big-time metro about something at the golf tournament. Gilda said, "Oh yeah, my uncle wrote that story. He quotes me all the time whenever he needs a good quote."

 

I guess editors are never asleep at the wheel. Some of you guys have some serious ego problems, too. You damn right there are editors asleep at the wheel. This shit should have been caught long before 13 years had passed. Good God are you that damn arrogant?

I'm not excusing the writer. She's the real POS here. But you damn right the editors share some responsibility in this, too. You don't like it? GFY.

 

The next interesting post you contribute here will be your first, Doc. Enjoy your holidays.

 

Recently read a piece from one of my favorite columnists. Best quote to support his premise was anonymous, based on a random encounter with a random fan.
Do I think the scene went down like that? No. Could I prove it didn't? No.
I see that tactic a lot.

 

One of youf favorite columnists might have been one that I worked with for several years.

But in my case, his license -- in my humble opinion -- went far beyond what you cited.