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Open a newspaper and you expect to read, more or less, the truth. So what happens when it turns out that journalists invent their stories? Ask Stephen Glass or Jayson Blair or Janet Cooke. They all spent parts of their careers inventing stories before being caught and fired.
Imagine the scene: Washington DC, 1980. Janet Cooke writes a long article for The Washington Post describing the world of eight-year-old Jimmy, a child living in terrible conditions in the poorest part of the city. She writes about every detail of his life, even describing the ‘baby-smooth skin of his thin brown arms”. The story shocks Washington, and Cooke wins a Pulitzer Prize for outstanding journalism. But when the city government tries to find Jimmy to help him, Cooke goes quiet. Under pressure, she eventually admits that Jimmy doesn’t exist.
Stephen Glass, a star reporter at The New Republic magazine, invented stories for years. ‘My life was one very long process of lying and lying again to work out how cover those other lies’, he says. Glass made great efforts to avoid getting caught. He created fake notes, fake faxes, fake email addresses; he even designed a website for a company that didn’t exist. Eventually, he got caught when he wrote a story about a 15-year-old boy at a conference of computer hackers. His editor insisted on seeing the conference room. Of course, there was no conference room. And no conference either. And no 15-year-old boy. Glass’s career as a journalist was finished, but he wrote a novel about his life, The Fabulist.
The most recent case was Jayson Blair. A 27-year-old journalist for the New York Times, Blair invented details for at least 36 of the 73 articles he wrote in his final seven months with the newspaper. He frequently pretended that he was doing interviews with people all over the US, from Ohio to Texas, when in fact he was simply inventing the stories in New York, or copying them from other media. When the truth came out in 2002, the media world was shocked.
The message for us, the public? Don’t believe everything you read, even if it comes from our favourite, trusted newspaper!