As a reporter, you’re always looking for that one great source to help illuminate a story. Someone whose personal tale mimics that of larger suffering, or a greater good. A source who is the story, rather than someone who can just talk about it. This is hammered into every reporter on just about every beat — get me someone to hang the story on. Find the perfect source to get people into the story.
The search for the perfect source is an everyday part of journalism. Rising gas prices? Don’t just get a talking head from an oil company, analyst firm or NGO — find Joe Sixpack who left his car at home all week. Even better if he owns a Hummer and knows how to give good quote.
Every story is supposed to be humanized, to speak to the average reader or viewer. And so we journalists trudge out into the streets, send out mass emails, and needle our friends, family and contacts for that one perfect source.
The press is addicted to the perfect source. And it results in some paint-by-numbers work. How many times a day do you encounter stories that begin with a single person’s tale. You can almost count the words until you hit the inevitable, “Joe Sixpack is like [number] other people in [insert city/state/province] who [insert hobby/problem/etc].”
Ah, the human touch.
People like hearing about other people. All the better if it’s someone they can relate to. It’s a standard (albeit transparent) practice. For the most part, it does the job. But it also leaves the press open to manipulation. Some people seek to be the perfect source in order to gain some kind of benefit for themselves. Some just think they’re being helpful by offering the reporter what they seem to want. Others are just liars.
So, how do journalists tell the difference?
Sometimes they do significant, patient research to verify a source’s claims. This requires time and dedication. It’s also a luxury not afforded in many of today’s skeletal newsrooms. Other times almost no fact checking is done. The source is taken at their word; the reporter trusts their gut.
It depends on the story. If a reporter is out to gather a few man-on-the-street quotes about the topic of the day, they don’t bother to check on the people they talk to. It’s a one-off call for opinion, nothing major. The worst that happens is someone decides to have a little fun and give a fake name like Heywood Jablome. (Hey would ya blow me?)
Then there are stories that seem to pin everything on the tale of one — usually hard luck — person. The reporter will spend time with them, trying to coax out colorful anecdotes and details. They try to learn as much as possible in order to tell the story with authority. The extra effort can, in the best cases, result in a powerful personal tale that illuminates a larger truth. In the worst cases, you get a story where the person is not what they claim to be, or they never existed in the first place.
The latter is best exemplified by Janet Cooke’s legendary fabrication of the world’s most perfect tragic youngster.
“Jimmy is 8 years old and a third-generation heroin addict, a precocious little boy with sandy hair, velvety brown eyes and needle marks freckling the baby-smooth skin of his thin brown arms,” began her story, “Jimmy’s World,” which was published on the front page of the Washington Post in September 1980.
A few paragraphs down comes the inevitable “Jimmy is not alone” sentence:
“Heroin has become a part of life in many of Washington’s neighborhoods, affecting thousands of teen-agers and adults who feel cut off from the world around them, and filtering down to untold numbers of children like Jimmy who are bored with school and battered by life.”
Cooke, who lied about her professional experience to land the Post gig, knew she needed the perfect source to tell her story and get it on the front page. So she invented him. He was so perfect that he earned her a Pulitzer.
As noted in an article by author Alex Boese on his comprehensive site Museum of Hoaxes, a disgraced Cooke later went on Donahue to tell her story.
“She blamed her decision to invent Jimmy on the high-pressure environment of the Washington Post, which was still riding high from the journalistic coup it had scored in the early seventies with the Watergate story,” he writes. (Needless to say, Deep Throat was another kind of perfect source.) “Apparently numerous street sources had hinted to her about the existence of a boy such as Jimmy, but unable to find him, she eventually just created a story about him in order to satisfy her editors at the Post who were pressuring her to produce something.”
One can almost hear her editors telling her to hand in the story only when she’d found a good source. Bereft of professional ethics, Cooke made up what she knew her editors wanted. What every editor wants.
The other kind of dangerous perfect source — the liar — is best exemplified by two recent stories in the New York Times.
The first was a front page tale of the iconic “man in the hood” whose photo became the signature image of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. The Times thought it had scored an in-depth interview with the person whose experience could best tell the story of an Iraqi put in a tragic situation by the invasion. After the story ran, Salon raised questions (background) as to whether the Times really had the man in the hood, the perfect source. After taking time to fully check his story, the Times agreed.
It wasn’t the man. The paper published an Editor’s Note that began:
A front-page article last Saturday profiled Ali Shalal Qaissi, identifying him as the hooded man forced to stand on a box, attached to wires, in a photograph from the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal of 2003 and 2004. He was shown holding such a photograph. As an article on Page A1 today makes clear, Mr. Qaissi was not that man.
The Times did not adequately research Mr. Qaissi’s insistence that he was the man in the photograph…
The Note then states that other media outlets such as PBS and Vanity Fair had also cited Qaissi as the man in the hood. So he seemed to be a bona fide source. Then yesterday, for the second time in less than a week, the Times ran another Editor’s Note about a perfect source that wasn’t. It began:
An article in The Metro Section on March 8 profiled Donna Fenton, identifying her as a 37-year-old victim of Hurricane Katrina who had fled Biloxi, Miss., and who was frustrated in efforts to get federal aid as she and her children remained as emergency residents of a hotel in Queens. Article
In reality, as the Note (and a follow-up story) goes on to admit, “…she was not a Katrina victim, never lived in Biloxi and had improperly received thousands of dollars in government aid.”
The truth came out after she was arrested by police. The Times again had to admit it “did not conduct adequate interviews or public record checks to verify Ms. Fenton’s account, including her claim that she had lived in Biloxi.
Such checks would have uncovered a fraud conviction and raised serious questions about the truthfulness of her account.”
It took her at her word. More was done to verify Qaissi’s tale, but he too turned out to be an imperfect perfect source. The truth of both tales was there to be found, but the paper didn’t push hard enough to find it. The reality is that the daily press, dealing with shrunken newsrooms and pressure to publish news-making stories to compete in a fragmented media landscape, will continue to fall victim to its addiction to the perfect source.
It’s a byproduct of how journalism works, and how it doesn’t.
