A fascinating story ran in The New York Times over the holidays. It seems that a veteran reporter for a small newspaper – The Cape Cod Times (circulation around 40,000) has been making up people and narratives and placing this fiction into her feature stories. And, she has done this work of deception since at least 1998 – maybe longer, but that is as far back as the electronic record goes.
From the story:
Maybe it was the tidiness of the tale. Or the notion that adults were unfamiliar with Veterans Day. But the article did not ring true to the editor and she set out to find the Chipmans. She searched several databases but turned up nothing.
They asked Jeffrey for her reporter’s notes, but she claimed to have thrown them out.
… “That’s when the alarm bells went off,” Mr. Pronovost said. He ordered a full review of her work. For three days, three editors pored over a public-records database called Accurint. They examined voter rolls and town assessor records. They checked Facebook profiles and made phone calls. And they concluded that, over the years, Ms. Jeffrey had written dozens of articles that included people who did not exist.
The next day, Dec. 5, Mr. Pronovost and the publisher, Peter Meyer, wrote a front-page apology to their readers.
“In an audit of her work, Times editors have been unable to find 69 people in 34 stories since 1998, when we began archiving stories electronically,” they wrote.
“Jeffrey admitted to fabricating people in some of these articles and giving some others false names,” they added. “She no longer works at the paper.”
The Times article hints at some plausible reasons why Jeffrey might have begun to fabricate items in her reporting. What is bizarre is that these pseudo-quotes were concocted for features stories – the easy type of quotes to obtain.
“You go to the parade, you get a quote, you put it in the story,” said Matt Pitta, the news director … “It’s not like trying to get a quote from an indicted politician who won’t speak to you.”
Puzzling indeed. Perhaps laziness compelled Jeffrey. Or, perhaps it was the lure of having spicier stories. Or, maybe even it was sheer boredom – perhaps Jeffrey longed to write fiction, rather than everyday stories from small-town happenings.
Although no crime was committed, the journalistic integrity of Jeffrey is forever gone – and so is her job at the paper.
“So, what?” you’re asking. A reporter lied – big deal. Our cynicism suggests to us that it happens all the time. But it was the placement of the story that I found so interesting – even in a culture run amok with “there is no such thing as truth,” we long to be told the truth.
This small town story took up 1/3 of a page in the front section of The New York Times! I know by experience of placing large ads for The Lay Committee that an equally large advertisement in such a prominent place of the Times costs a fortune to purchase. And yet, here we have free publicity for the virtue of honesty – as told by exposing one individual’s vice.
We don’t just want the truth … we demand it. Journalists, accountants, airplane pilots, surgeons – we demand that all of these vocations practice their occupation within a framework of objective truth.
This disdain for lying, found in the New York Times, is refreshing.
We will continue to speak the truth, even when those with itchy ears do not want to hear it.
Katharine Q. Seelye, “Newspaper on Cape Cod Apologizes for a Veteran Reporter’s Fabrications” (New York Times, December 29, 2012)