A fair warning: journos, check your facts

Three US journalists are sacked for lying. We should take note. By Andrew Marshall in Washington

THE STORY of Mike Barnicle, the columnist at the Boston Globe whose columns failed the fact test, seemed to be over once he had resigned. It wasn't.

James Hirsch, who covered the story for The Wall Street Journal, wrote that the New York Times Company, which owns the Globe, had "declined to comment." As it turned out, he had not called the NYT's spokesperson, Nancy Nielsen, and she had issued a two-sentence statement. It wasn't much, but it was something; and that was that for Mr Hirsch. He was dismissed.

The last year has seen an epidemic of resignations, sackings and disciplining in the American media. Steven Glass turned out fallacious articles for The New Republic and others; CNN's ill-fated Tailwind story, claiming that the US had used nerve gas during the Vietnam War, and against American deserters, was swiftly rubbished; as well as Mr Barnicle, Patricia Smith, also of the Boston Globe, resigned after inventing people and quotes.

Leaving the electronic media to one side, the cases of Mr Hirsch, Mr Barnicle and Mr Glass are all quite different. In particular, most journalists will feel a frisson over the Hirsch case. What he wrote was certainly untrue, but, in the context of the lives most reporters lead, the lie was understandable. Mr Hirsch himself told The New York Times that he had been on a tight deadline, and had thought (based on earlier conversations with Ms Nielsen) that she would have no comment. Most journalists would count her statement as a voluble form of "no comment."

Steven Glass, on the other hand, would not have lasted 10 minutes at the Journal. He made up stories from start to finish, even going to the length of fabricating a website and a voice-mail box for a company that he had invented.

Mike Barnicle falls somewhere in the middle, in a way that illustrates something important about all three cases. He was a long-time city columnist for the Globe who had risen through the ranks. He was writing in a tradition popularised by writers such as Jimmy Breslin and Mike Royko, of straightforward, hard-hitting messages presented through narratives of local folk and their ways. The column for which Mr Barnicle was pulled up concerned two children in a cancer ward, one white, one black. It was a heartwarming story of hands stretched across a racial and class divide, but it proved impossible to substantiate.

The culture within which writers such as Mr Barnicle grew up was more accommodating to the foibles of these journalists than, say, to court reporters. Newspapers have subcultures that set the standards as much as contracts or written rules. But, over time, these cultures change; Mr Barnicle may not have been sufficiently aware of the shift.

Mr Glass was clearly operating outside any relationship with the truth. He had moved rapidly to the New Republic, a magazine with a high reputation to defend. He did not understand that, and continued to act in the way he had on much smaller publications, where a collision with the outside world was less likely. Mr Hirsch had the misfortune to make a slip-up on the wrong story - one that concerned reporters making things up, and about a rival newspaper group, where the standards of expected behaviour were far more rigorous.

Both Mr Hirsch and Mr Glass knew that what they were doing was wrong, but the former did not think it was significant, and the latter thought he wouldn't get caught. Mr Barnicle's case seems to be different. He believed what he was doing was right, because it had been in the past.

The media is in the throes of great change, upsetting old assumptions about what is and isn't right. In particular, print is increasingly a hard-nosed business driven by managers, not journalists, and some cosy old subcultures are disintegrating under that pressure. Equally, the media is big news in America, and under greater scrutiny than ever before. All three journalists were shopped by other media: Mr Hirsch by the New York Times Company, Mr Barnicle by a former employee of the Reader's Digest, and Mr Glass by another magazine.

Journalists are also a popular target. The press and television are not held in high regard by Americans, and the Monica Lewinsky affair has not helped. Many criticisms of the early reporting of the affair - that it was unsourced and not based in reliable fact - have lessened now that it is clear that the stories had substance. But while the media may feel vindicated, most people think the story has been over-reported, and want to know less about it.

The hunting-season has probably only just begun. Scott Shuger, who writes a regular column on the press for the Internet service "Slate," says that there are two more journalists on other papers who are "plagiarists and fiction writers", and that he may publicly expose them. Plenty of people would be happy to see more journalists out on their ear. That sound that you hear in the newsrooms may just be the noise of axes grinding: it's time to start making that extra call, and checking your notebooks.