Undermining News Credibility
Threatens American Democracy

By Bill Finucane

This is how it might have been some months ago in the NY Times editorial office, as one editor spoke to another about a story:
                ‘Oh wow, look at this. This is too good to be true.’
                ‘What? Has it been checked?’
                ‘Of course someone’s checked it. What do you think I am, green?’
                ‘Yeah, we’ll give it page one. This kid is dynamite. This Jayson Blair is a tale spinner galore.’

                 And so it might have been before the readers of New York Times were presented with a Jayson Blair piece: riveting, exciting, pertinent and made up wholly of untruth.

This happens in the news business, every now and then. Editors get sloppy. Reporters can’t reveal their sources. So one mistake in, say, 10 years can happen. Nobody is going to expect perfection from journalists.

But Blair built his dizzyingly quick surge to New York Times superstardom on these splashy stories. But they were lies. Or they were acts of plagiarism . Or they were both. Regularly. Day after day, month after month they were fabrications.

And the fabrications got past the editorial brains that set the standard for the newspaper business.

Time after time, they apparently had a question or two on a story. Time after time, they apparently didn’t get any answer.

So they published it.

Well, that’s marvelous.

Editors from the Times apologized and said they intend to fix the problem right away. Sorry, too late!

It’s too late for journalism as a whole.

This would be one thing if it happened at the Podunk News out somewhere in the sticks. Lots of readers would be appalled, editors and publishers would apologize and then they would get back to business.

But this is the ‘newspaper of record’ for the United States.

Yes, we have lots of other papers that claim to be best at news, sports, features, business and so forth, and all can make a case in their own advertisements. But when all is said and done, however, the New York Times is still at the top.

That, of course, means it is supposed to have all the most polished editors, insightful columnists, marvelous sports writers, sonorous editorial stylists and, naturally, at the bedrock, a crew of hungry reporters who can track down stories others simply cannot. (Eh, perhaps that’s because they don’t exist?)

Having all those stellar people, the Times spewed out story after story under Jayson Blair’s byline.

Why he was so good, he was even promoted.

Remember, he is a black journalist and was getting special consideration. The consideration he was supposed to get was supposed to be based on achieving editorial excellence, plain and simple. Obviously he did not begin to achieve that goal, and deserved none of the consideration he clearly received.

So the editor rounded up the employees in a theater behind the Times and let them have their say, after apologizing to them.

Executive Editor Howell Raines told the staff: “I’ve received a lot of advice on what to say to you today, all of it well intentioned. The best came from reporters who told me to speak from the heart. So the first thing I’m going to tell you is that I’m here to listen to your anger, wherever it is directed. To tell you that I know that our institution has been damaged, that I accept my responsibility for that and I intend to fix it.”

He can’t.

The damage is not just what’s been done to the Times, it’s the damage that has swept across journalism throughout America.

What about the reporters in Iraq, for example. Can any reader now believe unequivocally what they have written?

Will the American newspaper reader now have to mistrust all the reporters?

Many people will always worry that this story – the one right there in front of them today – just might be another Blair. That is an especially important issue now.

Why?

Because this nation’s only true democratic strength comes from a relatively small group of believable newspapers, magazines, books, televisions news shows, radio programs and some Internet contacts.

All of those news sources depend on information gatherers whose only duty is to find and expose the truth relating to politics and news events of all types. Nothing else should matter to them.

Without them, democracy dies.

That is not hyperbole. Democracy dies without them.

If democracy dies here, it survives nowhere. And we are not so far from that.

This is a pax Americana.

America is the world’s only superpower. And now it appears that what America says goes, or there is war. From today until the end of the United State’s existence, we will fight terrorism, according to President George W. Bush. Given this state of perpetual war on terrorists, America needs a press that is stronger than it has ever been.

Most importantly, the American press must be absolutely trustworthy.

Blair-type liars can sour everyone on press reports, leaving us all without an authoritative source of information, and in such a situation propagandists will be quick to seize the advantage. There are already countless radio talk shows and various publications that give only the vaguest lip service to balance in their news coverage; they are right-wing polemicists and apologists, forever clamoring for a harder line in U.S. policies against the world at large, and at home against everyone who doesn’t tow a conservative line.

                In an information vacuum, dictatorship could quickly seize the United States.

If anyone deserves an apology it is first all the N.Y. Times readers, and secondly everyone in the United States who relies upon factual news coverage.

But such an apology should not stop with words – which can be twisted or false, even from the Times, as we now see – but in an explanation of how the Times is going to stop this from happening again.

Until that is done and demonstrated, every story has been tainted by Blair, and the N.Y. Times editors and publishers must bear the responsibility for that fact.