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a rebellion against certitude

The Sacramento Bee has an unbelievable account of its probe of star columnist Diana Griego Erwin. I was thinking that perhaps a stressful divorce had led her to fabricate, but no, it’s clear her entire career was a fraud:

From Jan. 1, 2004, until her final column on April 26, Griego Erwin wrote 171 columns. The Bee’s investigation found 30 names in 27 separate columns that could not be verified during that time period. The people could not be found in voter registration rolls, property records, telephone books, identity databases or through scores of phone calls….

Many of the columns in question fit a template: essays, often with a surprising O. Henry twist, about a singular person who faces a challenge and surmounts it. Their stories frequently reflect a theme taken from current headlines – wildfires, for example, or prison brutality, school shootings, murderous road rage or a high-profile trial.

But apparently they all were lies. It’s really just sickening … not only do these frauds do a tremendous amount of damage to our credibility when they’re caught, but they also make every other hardworking reporter look bad to their editors while they’re “working.” It hard to get great anecdotes.

I remember working at the Union Leader, where I wrote about what then sounded like a promising cancer cure involving mice. My story was quoted local doctors expressing caution (“These type of news stories are just tremendously hopeful,” said Dr. Denis Hammond of the New Hampshire Oncology Hematology Professional Association. But a “lot of us have heard a lot of times, this one treatment is going to be the cure for cancer, and unfortunately, that hasn’t panned out.”)

Not a bad article, but I was blown away when I read Boston Globe columnist Patrica Smith’s take on the subject a few days later:

Claire has heard the media furor about the “cure” for the killer, about the mice who had what she has and now they don’t. “I’m not proud,” she says. “Right away I said ‘Rub it on my skin, pop it to me in a pill, shoot me up with it.’ If I could find a way to steal it, I would. Hell, if I could get my hands on it, I’d swallow the whole . . . mouse.” Claire laughs, an ugly sound. She uses harsh language, new language for her. It’s the only language she feels the ogre understands.

Nobody knows she has it yet. She’s still a slightly chubby 142 pounds, she still has her hair, and her eyes haven’t sunk back into her head like the eyes of the people in those pictures she sees, those pictures that look like death no matter how perky the silk scarf, determined the smile, or well-crafted the makeup. Nobody but she and her doctor and her mother know the diagnosis. None of her friends know that there is something false and foreign growing inside her, an ogre she imagines chomping away slowly at her heartbeat. No one has recoiled at those two syllables before drowning her in their damnable pity. Right now nobody knows that Claire has cancer.

What great writing, I thought. I wish I could have written something like that. How the hell did she find this woman?

It turned out it wasn’t that hard — “Claire” was just a figment of Smith’s imagination. If only I had thought of doing that!

Bee Executive Editor Rick Rodriguez basically admits that (probably like Smith) Griego Erwin escaped scrutiny because of her “elevated status.” Huh. I probably sound like a blogger here, but jeez, all these highly-paid “star journalists” need to be pulled back down to earth a bit.

With all this in mind, I found antimedia’s column on newspaper credibility pretty interesting:

The sixties were a decade of rebellion against government authority. For the first time perhaps, Americans realized that their leaders sometimes lied to them. A trust was broken. That broken trust led to decades of turmoil and anger and revolt and impacted our nation in ways that we are still trying to understand today.

The mid-90’s to the present have been a decade of rebellion against the information gatekeepers — the news purveyors we once trusted. There too a trust was broken. No longer are we swayed by Walter Cronkite’s sonorous “and that’s the way it was.”

The former was a rebellion against authority. The latter is a rebellion against certitude. …

In the clear light of the internet much of what we have been told is “true” turns out to be only partly so and much of what is propaganda fails the test of confirmation.

In the end, we are better for the turmoil, troubling as it is, for we can move forward with more confidence that what we know to be true really is.

How very postmodern! But I think he’s very much correct.

1 comment to a rebellion against certitude

  • “With all this in mind, I found antimedia’s **column** on newspaper credibility pretty interesting:”

    Was this a Freudian slip? Or have you welcomed me into the fraternity of columnists? 😉

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