This week in the news: A police officer in Washington State pulled over a man using a mannequin as his passenger to drive in the HOV lane, two hostages were taken at Hilary Clinton's campaign office in Rochester, New Hampshire, and a British teacher was arrested in Sudan for allowing her students to name a teddy bear "Mohammed".
You really can't make this stuff up.
In 2003, a New York Times reporter, Jayson Blair, was caught fabricating material for many of his stories. He made up things like quotes, details, and odd behaviors that his sources supposedly displayed. All of this information could have been collected the right way- through an interview. Needless to say, he was caught and his career all but ended.
The sad thing is, many people he misrepresented in his stories didn't come forward because they beleived that most news stories had some stuff made up. Tabloids and the paparazzi give us a bad name for distorting the truth. Credibility is something that is earned, and once lost is hard to gain back. People like Jayson Blair break the eggshells that people in the business are already walking on.
So with all of the news out there that's already compelling, strange, and interesting, why do journalists feel the need to make stuff up?
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2 comments:
Great post, Elizabeth. You are so right. There are plenty of great stories out there waiting to be told. In my experience, the journalists who make things up do it because they are lazy. Or maybe they're afraid they can't do the job so they resort to fiction. Journalism is not easy, but storytelling - with real stories - is rewarding. Think of all the people you won't get to meet if you resort to making up sources!
There is no real reason to make stories up. That is the only thing that separates us from authors who write fiction. If he wasn't reporting the news, the stories might have actually been interesting. Such a shame to watch journalists go down in flames like that, it's like the ultimate walk of shame. Not to say anything about the editors either, but if his stories kept on coming up to ridiculous to be true, I would have called and checked a source and they probably would have exposed him as a fraud a lot sooner. That's just a bad way to go out, he will never get hired as a professional writer again without people checking every single thing he does.
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