The fabulist who changed journalism (Janet Cooke at Washington Post 1980)

On September 28, 1980, ... “Jimmy’s World” was published on the front page. Cooke’s story, about an 8-year-old heroin addict, created an instant sensation—the 1980s equivalent of “going viral”—reprinted around the country and around the world. As DC Mayor Marion Barry and city health and police officials hustled to find the child and prosecute his guardian-tormentors, the Post stood fast behind its First Amendment right to protect its reporter from having to reveal the boy’s whereabouts. For this, the paper was heavily criticized, especially by black residents in the then-majority African-American city.

Sometime after 3 in the afternoon, Bradlee and Managing Editor Howard Simons received simultaneous phone calls. . . . asking about Janet’s résumé.

For nearly 11 hours—in various offices and conference rooms at the Post, in the Capitol Hilton bar, and even in City Editor Milton Coleman’s car as the two drove around Southeast DC looking for Jimmy’s house—Janet was alternately interrogated, cajoled, comforted, pressured, and flattered by Bradlee, Woodward, Simons, Coleman, and others.

Finally, at 1:45am, Cooke confessed to Woodward’s Deputy AME David Maraniss. “There is no Jimmy and no family,” she said, according to Maraniss. “It was a fabrication. I want to give the prize back.”

Cooke was desperate to escape the second-tier Weekly staff and thought her path off might be a story she was working on about a new type of heroin roiling the city. . . At one point an editor told her she didn’t have to use the child’s name, which eventually led her to a fateful thought: She could simply make the whole thing up.

Bolding in the above is mine, not in the original story.

This historical post was inspired by another article I read today, a puff piece worshipping the Washington Post, Katherine Graham, journalists in general, Steven Spielberg, and Meryl Streep. The article was promoting a new movie to be released this month "The Post".

I wanted to bring up this episode in the Washington Post's history. Fake news before the term "fake news" had been invented.

Janet Cooke had invented the story on the 8-year-old-boy being shot up with heroin. She has shouldered all the blame for this story. I wanted to point out the Washington Post's institutional faults, and management's personal faults, that enabled this story.

In my opinion the Washington Post management did not really act like they believed this story was true. The normal human reaction to being informed that an eight year old boy is being shot up with heroin is to immediately take action to protect the child. The management of the Washington Post did not do so, in fact they protected their reporter from having to reveal the boy's whereabouts.

This puts the Washington Post and the individuals in management in a very bad light: David Maraniss, Bob Woodward, Ben Bradlee, and Donald Graham, were they all child abuse enablers? Was they thought of an 8 year old black boy being shot up with heroin just no big deal to them? Or, instead, was it that they suspected that their was no reality behind the story they published, so they were not concerned that the local child protective authorities were not informed of the boy's location.

If the Washington Post did not have an institutional reliance on "anonymous sources" this story could not have been published in the first place. The Washington Post published on its front page a story by a young reporter who had been in its employ for less than a year. They only performed due diligence in checking out the story after the Pulitzer had been awarded, and Ben Bradlee had been embarrassed by phone calls about discrepancies in the reporter's resume.

I think we should remember this incident when we are bombarded by stories about the so-called "greatness" of the Washington Post.

The Curse of the Hope Diamond?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evalyn_Walsh_McLean

The Hope Diamond
On January 28, 1911, in a deal made in the offices of The Washington Post, McLean’s husband purchased the Hope Diamond for $180,000 (equivalent to $4,627,000 in 2016) from Pierre Cartier of Cartier Jewelers in New York.[3][4] The Hope Diamond was associated with a curse, and McLean’s first son was killed in a car accident. Her husband Ned ran off with another woman and eventually died in a sanitarium. Their family newspaper, The Washington Post, went bankrupt. Eventually McLean’s daughter died of a drug overdose, and one of her grandsons died in the Vietnam War. McLean never believed the curse had anything to do with her misfortunes.

“One reason we’re even still talking about what happened in 1981,” Kurtz says, “is because Janet Cooke was to the news business what Vietnam and Watergate were to political establishments.”

Cooke returning the Pulitzer, he adds, “was the moment that public trust gave way to cynicism. . . . Each subsequent episode tarnishes us all.”

With all due respect, Reed Irvine’s Accuracy in Media (AIM) report traces all the way back to 1969. When I found it during the Carter Administration, I subscribed to it - but only for a year, because I was convinced. Each new example was just another example of the same old same old. I was then only interested in one thing - not is there “bias in the media,” but ”Why is there bias in the media?”

A newspaper has one purpose: Make money for the people who own the paper.
The story sold papers. The Pulitzer award sold papers.
Even the retraction sold papers!

That’s all the Grahams, or any “journalist” cares about! - Strac6

Why is there bias in the media? It’s taken me decades to formulate it, but I am satisfied with my answer:
The natural disposition is always to believe. It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing. The man whom we believe is necessarily, in the things concerning which we believe him, our leader and director, and we look up to him with a certain degree of esteem and respect. But as from admiring other people we come to wish to be admired ourselves; so from being led and directed by other people we learn to wish to become ourselves leaders and directors . . .
The desire of being believed, the desire of persuading, of leading and directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all our natural desires. - Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)
Journalists know that journalism is negative about society, yet they claim journalism is objective. Since "the conceit that negativity is objectivity” is a fine definition of “cynicism,” it follows that journalism is cynical about society.
In the sense that every flaw in society motivates a “There oughta be a law!” response, cynicism toward society corresponds to the opposite of cynicism - naiveté - towards government. And naiveté towards government is a defining characteristic of “liberalism.” Journalists lust for influence, and journalists are “liberals.” And we wonder why - some even wonder if - there is “bias in the media!"

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