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Course Material for Media & Politics Professor Susan E. Gallagher, UMASS Lowell Flood the Zone With Innuendo: Walter V. Robinson's Approach to the News In his long career as a political reporter at the Boston Globe, Walter V. Robinson has come to specialize in what fans of his work describe as resume deflation and critics denounce as character assassination. Robinson's forte, which he has pursued for over twenty years, is digging up discrepancies between what public figures say about themselves and what documentary records and/or other people say about their achievements. In some cases, as in his articles on apparent gaps in President George W. Bush's performance of his duties while serving in the Texas Air National Guard, Robinson has focused squarely on documentary records and factual accounts. In others, Robinson has strayed into the far more slippery terrain of psychological profiling. Thus, in front-page portraits of former vice president Al Gore, former Boston mayor Ray Flynn, civil rights leader Paul Parks, and historian Joseph Ellis, Robinson did not simply point out inconsistencies between claims that each of these men had made about himself and what each had actually done, he called in psychologists to speculate about their motivations and summarized the opinions of of vaguely defined sources rather than relaying what specific individuals actually said.
Though it might seem like a short step from showing that someone has lied to portraying that person as a liar, a review of Robinson's work over the years illustrates that this shift can transform the writing of a story into a profound abuse of power. That is, when Robinson's aim has not been to expose contradictions, but to promote particular judgments about specific individuals, his reporting exhibits precisely the characteristics that he attributes to his targets, namely, a tendency to embellish, exaggerate, and stretch the truth to suit his purpose. However, whereas Gore, Flynn, Parks, and Ellis had all, according to Robinson, twisted facts in the interest of self-promotion, Robinson engaged in what is usually seen as a much more egregious form of deception by misrepresenting other people's lives. It is, after all, hard to figure out who is harmed when public figures such as Gore, Ellis, Parks, and Flynn commit the sin of self-inflation, but Robinson's misleading reporting on both well-known and ordinary people has ended careers, ruined reputations, inflicted deep humiliation, and, at least in the case of clergy sex abuse victim Paul R. Edwards, the latest addition to Robinson's roster, brought a blameless man to the brink of suicide.
Robinson's demolition of Edwards, which ensued after Edwards charged Monsignor Michael Smith Foster, a powerful canon lawyer, with sexual misconduct, stands out both for its viciousness and for its magnitude: Robinson and his allies at the Globe have assaulted Edwards' character and credibility in over twenty inaccurate articles, and the paper's editors, reporters, and ombudsman have ignored repeated calls for corrections from victim advocacy groups. However, what is most significant about Robinson's blitzkrieg against Edwards is not its anomalous aspects, but how closely it resembles his previous attacks. Indeed, what becomes obvious when the Edwards story is placed against the backdrop of Robinson's campaigns against more prominent people is that most of his smears involve a few well-worn devices, a set of journalistic sleights of hand that allow him to undermine his targets without having to draw on any significant body of verifiable facts.
Unlike Globe intern and New York Times reporter Jason Blair, who gave his counterfeit articles an air of authenticity by inventing atmospheric details, or former Globe columnist Patricia Smith, who nearly won a Pulitzer for fabricating plausible people, or former Globe columnist Mike Barnicle, who attempted to enhance his hilarity by copying jokes from a book that he claimed he had not read, Robinson achieves his ends by omission, distortion, and repetition, techniques that slant the truth but make it difficult to catch him in an outright lie. Surveying Robinson's deployment of these techniques between the early 1980's, when a jury found that one of his articles contained a substantial amount of false information, and 2003, when he finally collected the Pulitzer Prize, does not explain why he has labored to destroy so many people. However, it does shed some light on the indifference to the truth that has historically plagued the Globe's internal culture, and it also shows how dangerous it can be when journalists attempt to score points by playing up preconceived ideas about other people's character flaws. In 1982, in an early instance of what would eventually become his stock-in-trade, Robinson wrote an unflattering profile of John R. Lakian, a candidate for the Republican nomination in the Massachusetts gubernatorial primary. As he would in subsequent articles on other public figures, Robinson focused on contradictions between his target's self-portrayal and what documentary records seemed to indicate. Thus, in the Lakian profile, Robinson led with the line that his "inquiry into Lakian's background found what appears to be a pattern of discrepancies between what he says and what the records show about his upbringing, schooling, military service and business career." Then, as evidenced in the jury verdict in John R. Lakian v. Globe Newspaper Company, Robinson proceeded to malign Lakian with a series of true statements, along with a handful of erroneous assertions. According to the verdict, Robinson's 55-paragraph profile of Lakian included five paragraphs of substantially false information and three of those paragraphs were defamatory. Despite this finding, Robinson and the Globe claimed victory because the jury elected not to award Lakian any damages. The jury opposed any compensation for Lakian because the "libelous" information contained in the story did not alter its overall drift, which the jurors found to be generally accurate. With Friends like These... While most journalists would probably concede from this outcome that they ought to show more regard for the truth, Robinson apparently concluded that his mistake in the Lakian case was that he had relied too heavily on actual records. In any event, when later reporting on seemingly similar discrepancies in the personal histories of Parks, Ellis, Gore, Flynn, and Edwards, Robinson seized a new tactic, one which simultaneously increased the credibility of his allegations against his subjects, but decreased his need for verification. Specifically, rather than focusing on written documents or quoting particular individuals, Robinson adopted a practice of taking down his targets by summarizing the thoughts and opinions of vaguely defined collections of "colleagues" and "friends." http://www.catholicsandsurvivors.net/a_survey_of_walter_v.htm |