Posted on 10/22/2002 5:19:18 AM PDT by Pharmboy
The Associated Press said yesterday that it could not verify the existence of more than 45 people and a dozen organizations cited in news articles written by a reporter who was fired by The A.P. last month.
The reporter, Christopher Newton, was dismissed on Sept. 16, eight days after the publication of an article on criminal justice statistics that quoted two people — "Ralph Myers" of Stanford University and "Bruce Fenmore of the Institute for Crime and Punishment in Chicago" — who could not be found. A.P. editors found no trace of the institute either.
The news agency cited 40 articles with the dubious references, including the Sept. 8 article that led to its inquiry. The articles by Mr. Newton, who was covering the Justice Department at the time of his dismissal, covered subjects including education, civil liberties and stem cells.
The articles cited institutions like the "Education Alliance," "Voice for the Disabled" and the "Malen Clinic in New York." A.P. editors found no trace of any of these institutions.
Mr. Newton, reached by telephone last night, said in a statement: "The A.P.'s inquiry began after an incident in which there was substantial evidence that two individuals perpetrated a hoax. The company chose to publicly reveal only information that supported its accusations."
"I was not given an opportunity to account for the names of those people The A.P. did not find," he said. "Setting the record straight is an important matter. I am no longer pursuing the situation with The A.P., but rather with an attorney. We have already located some of those people The A.P. says do not exist."
Mr. Newton declined to give names or numbers for the individuals whom he said he had found. In an interview, he denied having fabricated people or organizations.
Mr. Newton was hired by the news agency soon after he graduated from Texas Christian University in 1996. He had been the editor of the student newspaper, The Daily Skiff, in 1995.
Prof. Tommy Thomason, who taught Mr. Newton in two reporting classes there, said he and his colleagues have been perplexed by the accusations because Mr. Newton's university work was without taint.
"He was a good writer and an excellent, excellent reporter," Mr. Thomason said yesterday. "Some people have a natural feel for the profession, and Chris did."
The issue of possibly fabricated names did not arise until shortly after the Sept. 8 article, which was on federal statistics on violent crime.
The article had quoted a Bruce Fenmore as saying: "There is overwhelming evidence that people who commit assaults do it as a general course of their affairs. Putting those people behind bars drops the rate."
Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri, called a reporter for The New York Times, Fox Butterfield, and said he had never heard of Mr. Fenmore, Mr. Butterfield said. Mr. Butterfield said he tried and failed to locate Mr. Fenmore and another source in the article, Ralph Myers. He called Mr. Newton in Washington. Mr. Newton, he said, responded that he had found the names on a Rolodex passed on to him by a former Justice Department correspondent. In a later call, he changed his explanation, saying that both of the questionable sources had called him volunteering their comments, Mr. Butterfield said.
In an interview yesterday, Mr. Newton said that all the disputed quotations reflected individual conversations he had had with sources. He added that he could not promise that every name was a real name and was spelled correctly, or that the organizations cited still existed.
Kelley Smith Tunney, a spokeswoman for The A.P., said yesterday that the earlier questionable sources, named in articles dating back to January 2000, went undiscovered because the quotations involved were "innocuous" and tangential. "We were blindsided," Ms. Tunney said.
In an article on April 17, 2001, about Congressional efforts to make it harder to declare personal bankruptcy, Mr. Newton cited "Jim McLarnen, a spokesman for Fair Credit, a group that lobbies for credit companies," as saying, "There are people who are just irresponsible, and it is time we started making them pay for that." Now, The A.P. says, it can find no evidence that this man or his group ever existed.
Probably they do...
they just all suck at their jobs.
Yeah, he had a natural feel for the profession alright -- a natural at lying, fabricating, and slanting.
I'd be an excellent, excellent reporter too if I could make everything up.
The evening TV News shows - while not exactly *inventing* sources - locate them via a "ringer routine." Let's say that El Maximum Presidente Senor Bush proposes a prescription drug plan. The network, not wanting to say anything good about El Presidente OR his plan, calls up its toadies at the DNC and says something along the following lines:
"Hey, Stan, I need a family, preferably white, halfway prosperous, midwestern, who will NOT benefit from this new drug plan Bush has come up with. I can have a crew on the ground anywhere in 2 hours. Get back to me."
About a half hour later, the phone rings and it's Stan back at the DNC with a number. "Here's a family in Dubuque Iowa. White, Midwestern, wife is a doll but has huge medicine needs. Husband makes 80, but the Rx bills are killing them." The DNC staffer has simply found a prominent local DNC activist family and passed the word to the nets.
An hour or so passes and the local affiliate crew arrives with a list of questions from the national reporter back in NY. A half hour of shooting, some interviewing, and the crew heads back to the station and backhauls the material via satellite to NY, where the reporter edits together his/her DNC hand-fed material.
Then, when the Nightly News comes on, there's that midwestern family sooooo MANY people can identify with with the wife who won't be helped by Bush's plan. This machinery has been in place for DECADES.
Michael
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