Katherine Anne Porter said about her work, "I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction." Of course, she wrote a novel. I can imagine that that idea could be applied to journalists as well, in a very different way. Journalists by their sworn allegiance to their vocation try to tell the truth, but that is often a difficult thing to do. Psychologically it's very complex to see something, process it, and then produce your own version of it in print without some kind of intervention. It's a difficult thing to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, because you are an imperfect processor. Your interests are always alive and working.
I guess some journalists are also careerists, and they are also insecure. If a young black kid is growing up in a family that's thriving in white society, that black kid may have trouble understanding whether he's a black kid or a white kid. He may have trouble understanding the cost of following in his father's footsteps, say, or his mother's footsteps -- the cost in terms of the friends he'll be giving up, and the cost in terms of being vigilant every day about how he himself is perceived by other people. To make it easier to build a career, you could choose a career where it's very difficult to pin you down.
The aim or value of telling the truth can get distorted into the aim or value of getting published. I don't know an easy, simple way to describe the ethics of a situation like this one, because I think there really is some kind of pathology involved. I would love to hear this kid's description of his choices -- the choice points along these 50-odd instances [of plagiarism and fraud]. I would like to hear him describe what he was doing. My guess is his description would be smarmy and indistinct, and he himself would be confused. It doesn't sound like he's an evil fellow; it sounds like he's a profoundly insecure fellow, and what he's doing is trying to survive in a world that is basically alien to him on talents that he doesn't trust, so he has to resort to other means. The way he handles information is very common, really, in many levels of private life. It's not so common in the public life of a journalist.
Do you remember Joseph Ellis at Mount Holyoke College? [The Pulitzer Prize-winning history professor entertained his students in the classroom with vivid war stories until it was revealed that he had never been in combat.] He was, pedagogically speaking, extremely successful. Morally speaking, from the point of view of his colleagues, who got very righteous about his taking liberties with the truth in the classroom, he looked very different.
What Ellis did was, morally speaking, trivial. He was bearing witness, by telling a story, to an event in history that was real. He didn't distort the event. All he did was distort his perspective as a witness. He made himself into a participant instead of a witness for the purpose of engaging his students, and that was successfully done. As far as I know, this behavior didn't carry over into any other aspect or realm of his life or personal relationships, and it caused no harm that I could see -- and it was deceptive. It was one of those instances where a choice to tell a story, a narrative, making yourself the protagonist in order to bring history alive 1) was pedagogically successful and 2) became morally suspect. I think the reason it became so morally suspect (I could be wrong about this) was that what he did was so very common among his colleagues, they recognized it as something they themselves perhaps had done in the past or perhaps do to a much milder extent -- embellishing their own participation in world events and relationships with famous people and all that, name-dropping and so forth. They had to have a sort of public cleansing. They had to point and say, "Look what he did. It's wrong. You'd never catch us doing that" in order to deflect attention, maybe, in order to soothe the conscience. What Ellis did was by several degrees more egregious than what ordinary people do, but it wasn't different in kind. He's a very decent fellow and a wonderful writer, and this breach, I thought, was morally trivial and was made far too much of.
The breach of this guy [Jayson Blair] is entirely different because his commitment is to a very different public, and his motives are reputed to be very different. He is to be a witness, not a participant, and if he is falsifying what he pretends to witness, he's committing a fraud, and that is both legally and morally unjustifiable.
In a sense, [Jayson Blair's] supervisors are a much more interesting focus for a story than he is. What's the role of an editor or a managing editor? The easy part is setting up stories and points of interest and taking credit for successful circulation. The hard part is editing, and editing is not just line corrections, but in a newspaper setting it's being something more like a mentor, sometimes a censor, certainly a vetter. And if you don't do it yourself you have to hire somebody to do it. I mean, who doesn't have a fact checker in publishing? Does THE NEW YORK TIMES not need to question the degree to which they can trust the hundreds of people who are working for them all over the world for very different motives? That's a terribly difficult managerial problem, I would think. If you don't have absolute trust, you have to have fact checkers, and fact checkers cost money. For an editor it's easier to pretend that you trust all reporters than actually to do the hard and difficult work of following up on stories. In this case, it was perhaps especially difficult because the editors were dealing with a young, personable black reporter.
The obligation to tell the truth to another person is not equally in force across all relationships. When you're in an involuntary relationship with another person or institution, you don't have the same obligation to be truthful as you do in a voluntary relationship. Think about competitors in business. They are in an involuntary relationship with each other because they are both in the same field of play and yet they are competitors. If your competitor comes to you and says, "Tell me how you make your product, because it's better than mine, and I want to make mine cheaper and better. Tell me the truth about what you are doing," you don't have the same obligation to tell that person the truth about how you make your product as you do in a voluntary relationship where two people, either face to face, looking each other in the eye, or by some kind of contractual relationship, establish an agreement to treat each other honestly and forthrightly. A marriage vow or a deal with your child or a friendship or a course in which the teacher and student make a deal with each other -- those kinds of relationships are voluntary, and the burden to be truthful is to be taken very seriously, and violations really have to be justified.
