Just Trust Me

Many of you may be aware of the recent scandals that have cast a pall on the profession of journalism. Jayson Blair of the New York Times was found to have made up facts and plagiarized stories from other reporters. Rick Bragg, also of the Times, may not have credited interns and stringers for research. Robin Gregg of the New York Post admitted to plagiarizing a story from the National Enquirer on Wal-Mart’s decision to stop selling Kathie Lee Gifford’s line of sportswear. And if you can’t trust a journalist to give you an honest story about Kathie Lee Gifford’s sportswear at Wal-Mart, how can you trust us when we tell you that Jennifer Lopez may or may not have buttock implants? I can’t speak for my colleagues, many of whom are busy this time of year molting, but you will never find any such despicable shenanigans in this column.

As I gaze out across the canopy of the banyan forest that surrounds my treetop geodesic dome in Beacon Hill, I wonder how it came to this. I suppose it’s because we, as reporters, are so eager to please our readers that sometimes we take things too far. We want you to find our articles interesting and compelling, and while that’s no excuse for falsehoods and plagiarism, you’ve got to understand that this is a very stressful profession. Producing a timely story on a tight deadline is not an easy, straightforward task, like performing emergency room surgery to reattach someone’s arm after a thresher mishap. Even for world-class wordsmiths like me there are gray areas—gray areas that can become fuzzy and foggy, like a piece of lint in some fog.

Because I believe in being completely honest, I’d like to take this opportunity to clarify a few questions that have arisen over the years. After all, I have nothing to hide.

For starters, my June 1997 article entitled “I Fact-Check Copy All Day for This Band of Morons and I Don’t Get Paid a Cent for It” should have been credited to an intern. As the Times’ Bragg has pointed out, journalists often use research from stringers and interns without providing credit. In my case, however, the intern wrote the entire article except for the byline, which I typed in myself. Again, I cite this example only to show that I am on the up-and-up.

It has also been suggested that I plagiarized portions of my serial novel published on these pages from the years 1983 to 1999. Specifically, jealous critics have accused me of stealing that work’s main character, plot, setting, text and other minor details from some obscure old novel. To imply that my wondrous tale of an enigmatic millionaire named Gatsby is culled from another source is ludicrous. Coincidentally, my Gatsby does bear some resemblance to a character in a story by one F. Scott Fitzgerald, but in my novel Gatsby drives a black Duesenberg, whereas Fitzgerald’s Gatsby drives a yellow Rolls-Royce. This is just one of many important differences. If you accept the fact that there are no completely original ideas and no writer can have read everything that has ever been published, how is one supposed to avoid composing a piece that inadvertently shares a few similarities with a previously published work? It really makes me wonder whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them. So please believe me when I say that I will never plagiarize another writer’s work.

I’d also like to add that in the future I will double-check my sources to make sure they exist. And it was perhaps ill-advised to write, as I did in our last issue, that Saddam Hussein’s mustache had been found amongst some rubble in Baghdad. Like the accompanying sidebar on terrorists planning to crop-dust major cities with LSD, that item should have been double-checked. My wire service, the Weekly World News, refused to divulge its sources on the above stories, which is understandable given the sensitive nature of the information. I know it’s easy for readers to harbor skepticism when even the New York Times is under fire for factual errors, but I place my unwavering faith in the publication that broke the story when Satan escaped from Hell.

Your faith in the media might be shaken right now. All I can do is pledge that I will continue to tell the truth, especially if my employers make me take another polygraph test. ∂