Newspaper Scandals

This post covers an event that's been unfolding for around a month, but I haven't thought to write about it until tonight.

We all remember the Jayson Blair scandal at the New York Times, where a young reporter was caught faking an article, plagiarism even more, got fired, and then wrote a book blaming affirmative action for the whole thing. Personally I think most of what he said in the aftermath was just to save his ass and blame people higher up, but it is rather strange that no editor ever questioned him.

Recently there has been a new scandal in my hometown, Detroit. Mitch Albom, Detroit's best known sports and opinion columnist, was caught writing an article a few days before the events happened. He was caught because he described two guys at a basketball game who ended up not going to it.

I once met Mitch Albom. In ninth grade English class, the teacher took us on a field trip to the Free Press to here Mr. Albom talk about writing. I don't remember much of what he said, but I'm sure he said something about journalistic integrity. My impressions of him at the time (which was almost 8 years ago) were that he was pompous and felt that he could do no wrong. Guess that overconfidence got him in a bit of trouble...

but before all that happened...

He's written two bestsellers, has a radio show, is known by all in Detroit, but now he really fucked up big this time. It will be very hard for him to be credible now, and I suspect his career will be over in the coming months or years. He wasn't fired over this, but had to apologize enough times that it has become quite annoying.

I don't think what he did was that bad, I never trusted his writing anyway. He's very liberal and tends to dramatize the most mundane details, in effect wasting the reader's time. Of course, that's better than what he'll be now: boring as fuck. He'll be under a microscope and probably avoid any type of controversy.

The lesson to take away from this is that if you are a journalist, writer, blogger, etc, you shouldn't lie or steal someone's work. Not only is it bad as far as the ethics go, but you risk losing many of your readers if you get caught. At any rate, you'll lose your trust.

To my readers: You'll never have to worry about me lying on here, unless you consider hardcore cynicism to be a lie... and if I'm going to plagiarism anything, I'll link to it.