Posted on 04/20/2004 3:20:49 PM PDT by presidio9
The now-familiar specter of a journalist for a prominent newspaper fabricating a story has come up once again, this time involving one of New York’s most respected columnists.
The controversy stems from an April 7 Newsday column by Jimmy Breslin on how religion helps inflict physical and mental brutality. Part of that column relayed a discussion he said he had had with Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition, at the 1992 Republican Convention in Houston.
Breslin had failed to mention in the column where and when the conversation took place.
Breslin wrote, “‘Homosexuals are dangerous,’ Sheldon assured me one day. He was a short man with eyes gleaming when he mentioned how bad homosexuals truly are. ‘How?’ ’They proselytize. They come to the door, and if your son answers and nobody is there to stop it, they grab the son and run off with him. They steal him. They take him away and turn him into a homosexual.’”
The day the piece ran in Newsday, Sheldon was quick to respond that, not only had he not said those things, but that he had never even met Breslin.
“I know Jimmy Breslin fills his column with interesting and often fictional characters,” Sheldon said in a statement. “But the line between amusing fiction and political commentary seems to have been blurred in today’s Breslin column. I have never met Jimmy Breslin, never had the conversation described in his column today and never said those sentences to anyone in my life.”
Sheldon has certainly been willing to go on the record as being no friend to gay rights.
On Wednesday, April 14, Sheldon’s Traditional Values Coalition sent a mass e-mail that echoed his attributed quotes from 1992: “GLSEN [Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network] targets children for recruitment into the homosexual lifestyle as well as cross-dressing/sex change operations through GLSEN chapters that sponsor hundreds of Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) clubs on junior high and high school campuses across the United States.”
Whatever his personal views, Sheldon’s accusation has again brought journalistic standards to the general public’s attention.
By denying that he ever met Breslin, Sheldon is sending a fusillade aimed directly at a venerable Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, whose journalism background extends back 11 presidential administrations.
The New York Times’ Jayson Blair and Michael Finkel, Stephen Glass of the New Republic, and most recently USA Today’s former star war correspondent Jack Kelley made more headlines than they ever wrote after they were caught fabricating sources and quotes. They lost their jobs and gained overnight notoriety for compromising journalistic standards.
Breslin’s record of journalistic excellence runs deep. From his days as a sports reporter in 1950 for the New York Journal-American, he has been a respected member of the New York press from the old “Front Page” days when a raft of papers competed for readers’ attention.
Most notably, he was at the forefront of the Watergate scandal. In 1977, he became a news story himself as the recipient of letters from the “Son of Sam” serial killer. In 1986, he won the Pulitzer and George Polk awards for commentary.
Despite Breslin’s track record, Sheldon remains defiant that a conversation ever took place between the two men. To that charge, Breslin has produced two columns — one from 1992 and one from 1995 — that both averred to the conversation in question. Sheldon has not questioned the validity of those columns.
Still, what had left many scratching their heads is how the 73-year-old Breslin could remember the exchange of a 12-year-old conversation so well that he would put it in quotes.
On Thursday, April 8, Breslin’s column answered Sheldon’s charges, adding more quotes from Sheldon. He related that Sheldon thought pornography was the root of all evil, that homosexuality was an underdeveloped stage of heterosexuality, and that Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs should not be viewed.
The next Thursday, April 15, Newsday was forced to backtrack. While maintaining that the conversation did, in fact, take place, Breslin finally admitted that he did not refer to written notes and was paraphrasing the conversation from memory, despite using quotes.
“The result is that the quotes attributed to Sheldon in the April 7 column were incorrect and not Sheldon’s precise words,” an editor’s note in the newspaper from Newsday’s editor, Howard Schneider, said. “Breslin maintains, however, that they were an accurate reflection of the essence of the reverend’s views on homosexuality in the 1992 interview.”
Schneider went on to chastise Breslin: “The column did not adhere to Newsday’s standard of publishing only direct quotations that are accurate and precise.” Schneider did not indicate Breslin would receive any punishment other than this public reprimand.
Sheldon has accused Breslin of advancing the “gay agenda,” but whatever Breslin’s agenda, Pamela Strother, executive director of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association, said he has a license to write on the topics he chooses.
“Jimmy Breslin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, someone who is paid by a newspaper to have opinions. As such, he can advance just about any so-called ‘agenda’ he chooses,” she said. “Breslin’s so-called agenda tends to be the people, issue or event that happen to rile him or move him on a given day.”
When asked by the New York Observer if a columnist wrote by a set of rules different from a reporter, Breslin obstinately declared, “The rules are all the same. Tell the truth as best you can.”
Only a moron liberal (redundancy alert) would believe that Sheldon would make such a preposterous statement, no matter how "anti-homosexual" he is.
Pamela Strother, executive director of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association, said [Breslin] has a license to write on the topics he chooses. "Jimmy Breslin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, someone who is paid by a newspaper to have opinions. As such, he can advance just about any so-called 'agenda' he chooses," she said.
<sarcasm>So if you win a "prize" from a (left-wing) organization, then you can dispense with journalistic objectivity and instead publish propaganda as news.</sarcasm> Of course, this rule only applies if the propaganda is endorsed and approved by the Left; otherwise it's labeled "hate speech" and the author is viciously attacked. I wonder how many other big lies Breslin has told over the years to advance his Leftist agenda (and earn points toward his Pulitzer Prize).
I hope Sheldon sues Breslin and Newsday for everything they're worth!
As someone here once said regarding the issue of Homosexual Scoutmasters :
Just which part of, "We don't want our sons going into the woods overnight with homosexuals!" don't you understand?
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