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In Pulitzer Alley, one gold-framed plaque has been taken down for what the
New York Times calls "restoration". It honours Walter Duranty, a 1932
winner. But, after a series of complaints, the citation will be amended, to
note questions about his failure to cover the famine in the Soviet Union
that year
By Holly Yeager, Financial Times
London, UK, Monday, April 5, 2004
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The newsroom celebrations for Monday's Pulitzer Prize announcement will mark
the end of a fraught year for the US newspaper industry, as publications
large and small have struggled with questions of credibility and heightened
mistrust.
This crisis of confidence was not in the air a year ago, when The New York
Times toasted its latest winner of journalism's most prestigious prize and
prepared to add his picture to Pulitzer Alley - a winding corridor on the
14th floor of the paper's headquarters.
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Press gang: Washington Post staff celebrating winning last year's Pulitizer Prize for best international reporting
(Click on image to enlarge it)
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Neither was the departure of Howell Raines, himself a Pulitzer winner. He
stepped down as executive editor last June, along with his
second-in-command, after revelations that Jayson Blair, a young reporter,
had fabricated stories, prompting a broader examination of the Raines era.
In a lengthy, and at times bitter article in the May issue of The Atlantic
Monthly, Mr Raines writes that he had hoped to get the paper "off its glide
path toward irrelevance".
But his critics say recent changes in American journalism reflect a
desperation to hold on to readers against a background of an 8m copy decline
in US daily newspaper circulation over the past 20 years and increased
competition from television and the internet. Those forces have created a
culture that rewards flashy writing, prize-winners, and reporters eager to
plug their stories on television.
The declaration of a mistrial on Friday in the six-month trial of ex-Tyco
executives Dennis Kozlowski and Mark Swartz has been partly blamed on
decisions by the Wall Street Journal's online edition and the New York Post
to print the name of a juror who was later threatened. Instances of
plagiarism and fabrication have been reported from Connecticut to Chicago,
from Washington to Georgia.
Most recently, USA Today, the nation's biggest paper, said it had strong
evidence that Jack Kelley, a former foreign correspondent, had faked parts
of at least eight big stories, including one that made him a Pulitzer
finalist in 2002.
"Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley are the poster children of plagiarists and
fabulists," says Robert Rivard, editor of the San Antonio Express-News, who
helped uncover Mr Blair's cheating. But, as he wrote last week: "What once
appeared to be isolated incidents are now proving to be a larger pattern of
fraud."
In an editorial last week, the Hartford Courant in Connecticut - which
suspended a sports reporter for plagiarism and stopped using a food writer
for the same reason - expressed sadness over the USA Today revelations,
adding that recent plagiarism incidents "point to a disturbing blurring of
the lines between entertainment and factual reporting that should trigger
renewed efforts at self-policing".
Several suggestions to fix the problem have emerged. These include the
establishment of fact-checking teams to perform random audits of stories,
and stronger efforts to keep known plagiarists from being hired elsewhere.
The New York Times has changed its policies on bylines and datelines, and
hired a standards editor and a public editor, to deal with readers'
concerns.
But there are signs that the scandals have had a bigger effect inside
newsrooms than outside, where public attitudes towards the press have been
declining for two decades. A survey last July by the Pew Research Center for
the People and the Press found the public's ratings of the press unchanged
by The New York Times scandal. Overall, 56 per cent said media stories were
often inaccurate and 62 per cent said the press generally tried to cover up
its mistakes rather than admitting them.
Press scandals are, sadly, nothing new. The most famous case before the
recent incidents involved Janet Cooke, a Washington Post reporter who won a
Pulitzer in 1981 for a story about an eight-year-old heroin addict who did
not exist.
But Karen Hunter, reader representative at the Hartford newspaper, said she
had only been contacted by a few readers about the two plagiarists
identified at her paper. "It's more of a sin against writers," she said.
More often, readers complain about political bias, too little attention to
their neighbourhoods, or inappropriate photographs - as they did last week
when the paper printed a large front-page picture of the bodies of burned
Americans dangling from a bridge in Iraq.
In Pulitzer Alley, one gold-framed plaque has been taken down for what the
New York Times calls "restoration". It honours Walter Duranty, a 1932
winner. But, after a series of complaints, the citation will be amended, to
note questions about his failure to cover the famine in the Soviet Union
that year.
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