All the News Unfit to Print

Most of the material in chapters two and three appeared in a different form in a previous book of mine, Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism.

As for this book, it is a collection of aberrations. Most journalists do not perform their duties as did those in the preceding pages.

Nor do they behave like Dave Kindred, a columnist for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, one of several reporters who pronounced a man guilty of a terrible crime even though he had not even been arrested and in fact never would be.

On July 27, 1996, three pipe bombs exploded at the Olympics, held in Atlanta that year, and two people were killed, with 111 more injured. Richard Jewell, a security guard, discovered the bombs in a knapsack at Olympic Centennial Park shortly after one in the morning. He had no idea what was in the knapsack at the time, but it looked suspicious to him and he immediately called for help. As he waited for it to arrive, he assisted in the evacuation of the area, still crowded at such a late hour because of a rock concert. There is no way of knowing how many lives he saved, how much pain he prevented. He was, for two or three days, considered a hero.

Then, with no evidence other than Jewell’s proximity to the crime scene, and the assistance of a so-called profiler who found Jewell something of a loner, the FBI told the press that he was now a “person of interest” in the case, and to a number of news outlets, rabid about the story, this meant he was not only a suspect, but was probably guilty of planting the knapsack himself.

Numerous television and print outlets either suggested or declared Jewell’s guilt, but no one reported more irresponsibly about Jewell than Kindred, who wrote several columns about the crime, comparing Jewell—who, I repeat, was never arrested or charged with even the most minor of offenses—with a convicted mass murderer named Wayne Williams.

“As the FBI searched Jewell’s house,” wrote Kindred in one of the columns, Jewell “sat in the shadows with his back to the world. . . . He sat there, waiting [presumably for the authorities to turn up evidence of his guilt]. He sat seven miles from Centennial Park.” Kindred concluded his column as follows: “Richard Jewell sits in the shadows today. Wayne Williams sits in prison forever.”

Jewell escaped from some of the shadows later in the year, when the U.S. Attorney in Atlanta informed Jewell’s attorneys via mail that their client was no longer a suspect. At a press conference a few days later, Jewell expressed his gratitude. But, obviously still troubled, he also criticized the FBI and the media for their treatment of him. He knew that the accusations of journalists have a longer life span than the acquittals of law enforcers.

From Kindred, who attended the press conference, came another column, this one describing Jewell’s departure. Jewell, said Kindred,

took no questions and walked from the dais immediately, his left hand on his mother’s elbow, but how good it must have felt for Richard Jewell to say those words. Hero or fool? Such had been the question. If 88 days of federal investigation had led not to his arrest but to a government letter declaring him free from suspicion, then the answer seems to be Richard Jewell, hero.

It was as close as Kindred ever came to an apology. The Atlanta Journal and Constitution never even came that close.

On April 12, 2005, after a long search by various agencies, Eric Rudolph was arrested for the Olympic bombings. Rudolph, who had also set off explosive devices at an abortion clinic and a gay night club, confessed immediately.

Two years later, on April 28, 2007, Richard Jewell, still not completely out of the shadows as far as some people were concerned, died of complications from diabetes and kidney disease. He was forty-four years old and had never gotten over his media-inflicted shame.

Most journalists do not behave like Stephen Glass, who, in the 1990s, wrote fiction for the New Republic, insisting it was fact even though the magazine could not find the people, the places, or in some cases the organizations about which Glass reported in some of his stories.

They do not behave like Jayson Blair of the New York Times, who, a decade later, embellished his tales with fictional frills and plagiaristic frou-frous, which were apparently necessary because he did not even show up for a number of his assignments, instead relying for information on newspapers from the cities in which the events took place and then rewriting the articles from those papers. He first alerted at least a few of the Times employees to his misdeeds by his unwillingness, which turned out to be an inability, to file expense accounts. How could he? He had no airline receipts. He had no hotel receipts. He had no restaurant receipts. He had not gone anywhere! The accountants must have loved this guy. He had been a very cheap hire.

Most journalists do not behave like Jack Kelley, whose long-time status as a star political reporter at USA Today enabled him to make up sources for almost a decade and a half without serious challenge from any of his colleagues. This, in turn, gave him license to say almost anything he wanted to say about almost any subject, and to attribute the sentiments to almost anyone on the planet.

And most journalists do not behave like Ramiro Burr, a music writer for the San Antonio Express-News, who brought a new dimension to journalistic malfeasance that was not discovered until the summer of 2008. It seems that Burr had hired a ghostwriter for his columns, that the ghostwriter claimed to have written more than one hundred columns for Burr since 2001, and that he was tired of doing all that work without so much as a single byline, or even a farthing, to show for it. When the ghostwriter, Douglas Shannon, told the Express-News editors he wanted his name in print, Burr was told to clean out his desk and hit the pavement.

Most journalists behave like most other people in most other occupations. They do their jobs well or better than well. They realize that others depend on them and are stimulated by the need to meet their responsibilities. They want to succeed and to be rewarded for their success by gratitude, money, and maybe a few plaques at a few dinners in their honor. They believe that their chances of achieving these rewards are better if they follow the rules. By reporting news rather than making it up, journalists adhere to the norm. It is by contrasting them with the aberrant that we appreciate them more.

I also acknowledge that not all of the journalists about whom I have written were guilty of grievous misdeeds. Certainly Thomas Edison, Theodore Dreiser, and Mitch Albom were not. Neither was I, in my early days at NBC. (See my confession of skullduggery on the bayou in Broadcast Blues, published by HarperCollins in 1993, pp. 85-103.)

I chose to include these examples, and several others, to demonstrate the range of journalistic finagling that is possible and, more important, to illustrate the multitude of reasons for them. There are enough people in this book who serve as object lessons of more serious offenses and less forgivable motives; I thought I could afford a few lighter touches and different angles.

One of the more serious offenders would seem to be Janet Cooke. And she was, but I would put an asterisk by her name. After I read Mike Sager’s interview with her, I decided that the circumstances of her childhood were such that she deserves a degree of forgiveness. In Sager’s book, Scary Monsters and Super Freaks, the publisher introduced the chapter on Cooke with this note: “Janet Cooke caused the biggest scandal in the history of journalism when her Pulitzer Prize-winning article about an eight-year-old heroin addict turned out to be a fake.” The biggest scandal in the history of journalism?

I hardly think so. Somewhere in a ghetto in Washington, D.C., there was a Jimmy. His name might have been Joey rather than Jimmy. He might have been nine, not eight. His fetish might have been for a consumer good other than sneakers. His drug of choice might have been something other than heroin. But he was real, at least in his broad strokes, and there were a lot of boys like him in Washington and other places, and there still are.

To contrast what Janet Cooke did with what Walter Duranty did and find Cooke’s trespass the more vile is to carry sensationalism to the point of ignorance.

At any rate, it is because I came to feel a degree of sympathy for Janet Cooke that I did not seek to update her story. The most recent information I included about her in chapter fifteen will be, when this book is published, thirteen years old. So be it. Whatever has happened to her since then is her business. As far as I am concerned, invading privacy can be as serious a journalistic outrage as telling a lie.