These guys were real masters of deceiving honest citizens and their own editors. And some even snatched prestigious awards for their lies.
One of the most stressful things in the profession of a journalist is that you have to constantly communicate with people. Any text is based on this, be it an investigation of corruption in the city administration or a lyrical essay about a new novel by Alla Pugacheva. Except when you can just write columns and not do a damn thing else, but for this you need to be at least Oleg Kashin. You need to write, call, annoy everyone, sometimes go to meetings, talk non-stop, pull information out of people with tongs.
A treacherous thought that often creeps into the head of any journalist - it would be great not to depend on anyone and just come up with your stories from start to finish. With events that didn’t happen, with people who didn’t tell you anything, or maybe they don’t exist at all - but everything was smooth!
Of course, these are harmful thoughts that need to be pushed aside. Journalism differs from literature in that nothing can be invented in it. But the temptation is great, and not everyone can withstand it. Below are the stories of journalists who, seduced by easy fame, published fake texts and came to success, but were later revealed and disgraced forever.
Janet Cook: Pulitzer for the tale of a schoolboy on heroin
1980th year, Washington. Eight-year-old African American Jimmy drags out a terrible existence in a drug-filled ghetto: his mother takes heroin, his mother's lover takes heroin, and Jimmy himself has been taking heroin since he was five. Jimmy rarely goes to school, preferring to be put on drugs, and of the subjects he values only mathematics - you need to be able to count in order to push heroin on the streets (this is what Jimmy plans to do when he grows up to eleven). His mother, herself a heroin addict with experience, refers to what is happening, let's say, philosophically: “I don’t like to watch him poke him, but, you know, sooner or later he would have started anyway. Everybody starts."
Promotional video:
"Jimmy's World" takes heart, even if you know that all this is fiction from beginning to end - it is written with talent and sharpness (if you speak English, here is the full text of the "reportage").
Cook seemed like an excellent journalist: a young black woman (in the 1980s, just starting to pay attention to racial and gender diversity among employees) with an excellent resume, who wrote small articles for the Washington Post for several months, and then, apparently, found amazing texture and wrote reportage that broke the heart of America. Journalists extolled Janet's style and the importance of the issues raised in Jimmy's World, activists demanded that information about Jimmy be made public in order to help the poor child. The Post, however, stood to death: the law allowed Cook not to reveal the identity of his characters. In 1981, the Pulitzer Committee decided to reward the journalist. “They loved both the story Cook told and the opportunity to hand the journalist Pulitzer to an African American for the first time in history,” former colleague and boyfriend of Cook Mike Sager recalled in 2016.
Janet Cook.
It was because of the award that the deception was exposed: when Cook was talked about across the country, reporters from her hometown of Toledo, Ohio, found inconsistencies between Janet's resume and her real biography and told the editors of the Post about it, which raised suspicions - not whether he was lying is she somewhere else? The laureate was pinned to the wall and had to confess: she not only embellished the facts for her resume, but also completely invented Jimmy and his heartbreaking story. She returned the Pulitzer Prize, quit the Post.
Later, in her only big interview, Cook said that she was used to lying from a young age, because of the huge expectations placed on her in the family and the pressure of society. After the scandal, she disappeared from the radar. As Saeger wrote, in his e-mail about the comment, Cook replied: "Why, I have spent the last 30 years waiting to finally die." “Knowing her, I think she was only half joking,” Sager suggests.
The exposed deception hit the gut with American journalism, which has been on horseback since the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. Just now, reporters and editors were heroes exposing the lies of the military and the government - and the story with Cook reminded everyone that journalists themselves are not angels, and some are capable of blatantly lying. All editors had to monitor their employees much more closely and verify information in order to regain audience confidence.
Did it save you from Janet Cook's "followers", the masters of fake news? Of course not!
Stephen Glass: The Great Forger and His Hacking Paradise
Compared to Stephen Glass, author of The New Republic, Janet Cook, who invented just one report, is a pathetic amateur. Glass lied to Republic from 1995 to 1998, all three years that he worked there. During this time, he wrote 31 articles - as further investigation showed, at least 27 of them contained fiction. Somewhere he combined lies with facts, somewhere he just came up with everything from the very beginning.
Stephen Glass in life & hellip;
Stephen worked with talent. Vanity Fair wrote about him after being exposed: "He printed fake letterheads and faxes, showed fake notes from fictitious events he allegedly attended, drew fake diagrams of who sat where in meetings that never happened, and recorded fake voice messages." In addition, in The New Republic, the young rosy-cheeked Glass had a reputation as a good, shy guy who always goes to everyone for coffee, is very afraid of offending someone, a kind of affectionate calf. He also worked diligently, spent days in the editorial office, which earned the full confidence of his colleagues. Coffee, again, wears.
Glass got away with miscalculations in lies for a surprisingly long time. He took risks all the time: he mentioned a casino in Las Vegas, which allegedly accepts bets, whether the new NASA shuttle will fall, ignoring requests to name this casino, then he wrote that at the conference, right-wing activists drank booze from hotel minibars and raped a woman, and later it turned out that there were no mini-bars in the hotel he wrote about when he was born. But the authorities trusted Glass more than those who incriminated him, and the journalist only became impudent.
His swan song was the essay "Hack Heaven" (can be translated as "Hack Heaven" or "Hacker's Paradise"), where Glass described a phantasmagoric picture of a 15-year-old hacker being recruited by Jukt Micronics, whose website he hacked, and the kid is swimming in money. The essay begins with a stunning piece, where a hacker is hysterical in front of company representatives: “I want more money! I want to Disneyland! I want a lifetime subscription to Playboy!"
And in the biopic about myself - here he is played by Hayden Christenssen.
But after the publication, the new editor-in-chief Charles Lane realized that the matter was unclean: there was no information about Jukt Micronics except the web page made on the knee (needless to say, it was entirely invented by Glass himself). However, Lane was calmed for a while by a telephone conversation with the head of the company … whose role went to Glass's younger brother.
But the stubborn Lane got to the bottom of the truth: he went to the hotel, where the anti-burglary conference was supposedly held, and found out that on the day of the "conference" the hotel did not work at all. After several more painful attempts by Glass to hang noodles on the ears of the editor-in-chief, he nevertheless admitted his lie and was fired. His exposure was another turning point in the history of American journalism - the first time a journalist was revealed to have cheated on the editorial board for years.
Jason Blair: from pseudo journalist to life coach
“Jason Blair ended my newspaper career as unexpectedly as a heart attack or an airplane crash would have ended it,” recalled Howell Raines, editor-in-chief of the New York Times, who was fired after the Blair scandal. In April 2003, one of the most respected US newspapers experienced the most humiliating moment in its century and a half history: its reporter was caught lying and plagiarizing other people's articles. Like Glass, Blair deceived his newsroom systematically. Like Cook, he was African American.
Sad Jason Blair talks about his lies on TV.
Unlike many other cheating journalists, Jason Blair talks about his experiences often and willingly (of course, apologizing for what he did). According to his recollections, his lies began soon after the attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. At that time, he had been working for the newspaper for two years. “It was very difficult for all of us. I was sent to talk to New Yorkers on the street (to ask passers-by about their feelings and thoughts) … but I came back without a quote,”says Blair. "And instead of admitting it, I pulled a quote from the Associated Press." He was sure that the editors would notice the plagiarism, but the forgery worked, and gradually Blair began to add more lies and borrowings to his opuses.
“I was going crazy, but I still wanted to do my job,” Blair recalls. Later, when the deception was discovered, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. At the same time, he does not consider his diagnosis to be an excuse and admits that it was his weak character that was to blame, and at the same time alcohol and drugs, which he abused while working for the Times. Blair went into a steep peak: the fact of submitting the material to the editor became more important to him than the content of the text. And he went all out. For example, Blair completely invented his conversations with the father of Jessica Lynch, an American soldier captured in Iraq - he did not even go to her hometown, simply slightly changing the material of another publication. On another occasion, he allegedly spoke to four wounded soldiers in a hospital, while in reality he only spoke to one, on the phone.and for some reason also attributed to him invented quotations. After Blair was exposed, the New York Times, fully immersed in a tub of feces, released a large list of all cases of plagiarism and falsification of his authorship.
Jason Blair is just sad.
Against the background of this grandiose scandal, the dismissed Blair published the book "Burning down my teachers' house", where he described in detail how and why he deceived everyone (bipolar, weak character, substances). True, after more than ten years, he also regrets that he published the book too early, when he had not yet had time to realize the reasons and essence of what happened to him. “I will find all the copies and burn them,” he joked at a meeting with students. By the way, now he works as a life coach and tells how to rise from a full bottom when you let everyone down and they hate you. Must have been fascinating lectures!
Claes Relocius: Europe's best journalist who deceived everyone
America is not alone in exposing the deceptions of respectable journalists - just recently, in 2018, such a story happened in Germany. Everything is very similar to the stories of Glass and Blair: a serious, authoritative publication, a young and successful journalist under the weight of responsibility, “augmented reality” in reports, where the truth is densely mixed with failed conversations, plagiarism from other people's articles and fake quotes.
Relocius with the CNN award for the best journalist in Europe. year 2014.
Klaas Relocius has been writing for Spiegel since 2011, and, by his own admission, fantasized in at least 14 of his 60 texts. Things were going very well: the texts were nominated for prestigious awards, and in 2014 Klaas was recognized as the best journalist in Europe. For a long time, the deceiver was rescued by the genre in which he worked: features, long reports with many characters, often very exotic. Relocius brings to the editorial office a report about children recruited by the Islamic State, which is banned in Russia and everywhere, and how can the editor check if they were real children? Do not drag them to the editorial office? Moreover, the reputation of Relocius spoke for itself.
But gradually the German journalist went completely overboard, on which he got burned. In early 2017, when Donald Trump had just been elected president, Relocius traveled to Fergus Falls, Minnesota, where the majority of residents voted for Trump, and brought back a report on conservative rural America. Not entirely correct, to put it mildly, as noted by two surprised Fergus Falls residents, Michelle Anderson and Jake Krohn, in an article for the blog platform Medium:
Fergus Falls defenders Michelle Anderson and Jake Kron - we give their photos so that you don't think that we made them up.
Indeed, Relocius, it seems, did not even really take a steam bath, but just got drunk, describing Fergus Falls as a conservative hell: supposedly at the entrance to the town there is a sign "House of Damn Tough Boys", the mayor there is a 27-year-old virgin who drags to work " Beretta "and never saw the ocean (seriously, Claes, what does it have to do with the ocean ?!), and for the second year in theaters they play" American Sniper "by Clint Eastwood. Anderson and Krohn painstakingly refuted both this and all the rest of Relocius's lies about their city: they even showed a photo of the mayor on the ocean. With girlfriend.
The funny thing is that while the indignant residents of the slandered city were collecting evidence of lies, the fraudulent reporter had already managed to bring the co-author of another report to the surface. Journalist Juan Moreno, who helped Relocius with the text "Jaeger's Border", about a paramilitary group of volunteers patrolling the US border with Mexico, suspected that Relocius was lying, made a lot of efforts to find Jaeger himself and his associates, and they confirmed to him that nothing how Klaas never talked in life. Moreno told his superiors, they pissed off Relocius and he, like the rest of the heroes of this text, confessed everything. From Der Spiegel he was predictably flooded, he, of course, returned the awards. According to him, journalistic success became a drug for him. “It was not about great deeds, I was terribly afraid of failure,” Medusa quoted Relocius. - The more successful I became,the more the feeling that I have no right to fail pressed on me."
***
Can you draw any conclusions from these four stories? Most likely, journalistic deception will always occur. Black and white, men and women, are deceived, and the most authoritative publications, with their own fact-checking departments, are sometimes powerless. Each of the heroes of this text compared their lies to illness. It's easy to dismiss these excuses and subject them to well-deserved ridicule, but perhaps some of the blame for what happened really lies in the atmosphere of the eternal media race for sensations and exclusions, where if you are not the best, then you can go to hell.
Someone breaks down, starts lying, cannot stop, and in the end everyone loses: the would-be authors themselves, the media, and a society where no one has faith. Falsifiers, like spies, become known only after failures, and who can guarantee that right now some desperate author of a cool Western publication, throwing himself on antidepressants, does not come up with another fake article that everyone will believe?
On the other hand, falsification is an inevitable evil that damages the reputation of journalism, but is not able to destroy it. In the end, after each of the four cases described here, the editorial offices apologized to the readers, fired some, and … continued to work, because what else to do? Everyone can only be vigilant. And do not blindly believe the bright reports, where an eight-year-old drug addict wants to become a drug dealer, and the virgin mayor has never seen the ocean.