What the hell have they been teaching in journalism school? We have Dan Rather and Mary Mapes “fake but accurate” excuse for running a hit piece on a sitting president in the final months of a reelection campaign. We have The New Republic running an unverified piece on the supposed horrors of war containing events that never took place and people who never existed. Now we have the Idaho Statesman running a follow-up story on Republican Senator Larry Craig containing this jewel of a statement:
Four gay men, willing to put their names in print and whose allegations can’t be disproved, have come forward since news of U.S. Sen. Larry Craig’s guilty plea. They say they had sex with Craig or that he made a sexual advance or that he paid them unusual attention.
Their allegations can’t be disproved? How about proving they are true before running the story, rather than accepting them as true, unless you can prove otherwise? The journalistic process is supposed to be such that one proves an supposition true before accepting it as fact. Not the other way around. It’s Journalism 101.
Here’s more on the Statesman’s claims of legitimacy:
As with the Statesman’s August report, the new evidence is not definitive. There are no videos, no love letters, no voice messages. Like last August, they are he-said, he-said allegations about a man seeking discreet sex from partners whom he counted on to never tell.
But the Statesman’s investigation, which included reviews of travel and property records and background checks on all five men, found nothing to disprove the five new accounts. The men offer telling and sometimes similar details about what happened, or the senator’s travel records place him in the city where sex is alleged to have occurred, or his accusers told credible witnesses at the time of the incident.
In 1980, John Hersey, who did, in fact, have issues with plagiarism, said in The Yale Review,
“I will assert that there is one sacred rule of journalism. The writer must not invent…The ethics of journalism… must be based on the simple truth that every journalist knows the difference between the distortion that comes from subtracting observed data and the distortion that comes from adding invented data.”
Chip Scanlan and others wrote a list of guidelines for reporters to follow, after the Stephen Glass debacle at The New Republic. Scanlan reprinted this list in a 2002 Poynter Online piece:
Questions to Ask When Writing and Editing a Narrative That Reconstructs Events
- How do I know that what I have presented really happened the way I say it did?
- Is it true? According to whom?
- Do I not only have the facts right but also the right facts?
- How complete is my reconstruction? Is it based on one source, two or several? Have I tested it against the memory of other participants?
- Have I sought independent verification from documentary sources, such as historical accounts or public records? For example, my source describes a “dark and stormy night.” Did I call the National Weather Service and get the weather report for that date?
- Do I have a high level of confidence in my sources? Could I have been fooled by an unreliable source or a source with a faulty memory or an ax to grind?
- Is my purpose legitimate? Am I trying to convey the reality of an event for my readers or simply trying to entertain or impress people with my writing ability?
- Does lack of attribution — a hallmark of reconstruction — diminish credibility? Does a reconstruction need an editor’s note to help readers understand how the story was reported and sourced?
- Am I willing and able to fully disclose and explain my method to my editor? to my readers?
I would love to see what facts the Statesman’s Dan Popkey and the editors at the paper have to support their claims. So far, it is nothing more than speculation and supposition mixed in with correlation.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Alan J // Dec 12, 2007 at
Many thanks for this piece. It’s hard to believe that no news organization has challenged them on this.
Popkey was given the information that disproved the Denver story and intentionally did not include it - nor did he include the fact that the blogger who outs Rs had called that the accuser a liar. Popkey also knew the DC story was false - Craig lived on a boat in Southwest Washington at that time and had continuously for years, Popkey just plain made up the blurb about him moving to land between boats.
I hear that there that this piece has prompted some folks in Idaho to start an effort to scrutinze more of Popkey’s work for falsehoods and plagiarism. Stay tuned.
2 GOP TRUTH // Dec 12, 2007 at
In addition, I heard (living in Boise) that the reporter also had direct evidence that Craig was in no way involved in the so called 1982 page “scandal” including a lie detector test from that era as well as direct interviews with actual Congressmen that served on the ethics panel in ‘82 who said Craig was never named and the special counsel Joe Califano a democrat who said that Craig was never named as well. He just conveniently left those interviews out of any of his stories.
The paper in is lying to further the reporter and editors own personal political and professional agenda.
The commenter is right, when will a truly ethical news source in Idaho wake up and investigate the Statesman.
Hell, they did the same smear job to the University of Idaho a couple years ago for God’s sake! No facts, no wrong doing, just conjecture. Same reporter by the way.
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