EDITOR’S NOTE: This post has been updated with the response from The Oregonian and a rebuttal from Provo. Scroll down to read them.
Mark Provo, an Oregon Washington mathematician, was profiled by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Tom Hallman Jr. in the May 7 edition of The Oregonian. As soon as he read the article, he writes, he was "totally appalled. The article is not in any way a correct characterization of me, my life, my work, or the chronological events that have occurred. The article is filled with unbelievable errors, resulting from the incompetence of the reporter who wrote the article."
Provo then wrote a lengthy document itemizing what he saw as the errors in the piece. You can download it as a Word file here. It’s a very long document and we suggest you read it for yourself if you’d like to understand his objections. Here is a summary of a few of his complaints in this piece from the Willamette Week newspaper:
The math whiz profiled in May 7’s Oregonian Sunday edition by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Tom Hallman says the front-page account of his life was closer to fiction than fact. Mark Provo,
who disliked how Hallman portrayed him and his research, compiled on
his website (markprovo.com) a list of about 30 facts that he says
Hallman screwed up. Among them: a scene portraying Provo watching cars
crest a hill on I-5 outside the Peppertree West Motor Inn, where he
lived (Provo says there’s no hill there, which motel manager Daxsho
Sandhu confirmed for Murmurs), and a description of Provo being kept
awake "by a noisy couple in Room 113." (Provo notes there is no Room
113 at the Centralia, Wash., motel, which Sandhu also confirmed.) "It
was as if he was writing a novel," Provo told Murmurs. "It was
completely flabbergasting." Meanwhile, grumblings moved through the O’s
newsroom like smoke that editors are applying a double standard for a
star reporter. Provo says he notified the paper of the alleged errors.
No correction has run. Hallman was unavailable for comment.
The initial story is a 4,066 word feature that’s meant to read like a piece of literary journalism. Clearly, Hallman took some artistic license in writing the story, but the question is whether he went too far. Did he repeatedly flub his facts as Provo says? Or are these the objections of an unhappy source? Some of Provo’s complaints are about factual matters and would seem to be valid, while others object to the tone of the story and characterizations of him, which are also valid but more difficult to argue. Provo also objects to the fact that he is never directly quoted in the article. As of now, The Oregonian has not published a correction or editor’s note. Perhaps the paper’s ombudsman is preparing a report. The problem is that all we can do is speculate since the paper has been silent since the story ran. Provo’s complaints require a response. The clock is ticking…
UPDATE: Jack Hart, the editor who oversaw the Provo piece, has posted a lengthy, informative response here. And here is a correction the paper ran on May 21 to correct errors in the story:
A May 7 article on Mark Provo stated that he was 3 when his parents
were divorced and that his father died five years later. Provo says his
parents separated when he was 5 and that his father died three years
later. Provo also says his computer arrived in Centralia, Wash., by
bus, not by mail, and that the number of notebook pages he has filled
with notations is fewer than 44,000. The motel room next to the one
Provo occupied is Room 112, not Room 113.
We suggested that you read Provo’s lengthy complaints and so now it’s essential to also view what appears to be a reasoned response from the paper. Hart’s posting says they have confirmed just one factual error out of all of the accusations (though more than one was noted in the correction), and he presents some evidence from Hallman’s notes and emails from Provo to back up his finding. One important thing that Hart says at the beginning of his post is that he now regrets doing the story. Not because of Hallman’s work, but largely because of Provo. We’ve heard from a few readers who think Provo wasn’t worthy of such a long story and it appears that Hart agrees. UPDATE: Provo has posted a rebuttal to Hart’s post. See below.
Hart writes:
I’m Tom Hallman’s editor,
and when he found Provo I encouraged him to pursue the story. It struck
both of us as an appealing insight into human nature. What, we asked,
would cause anybody to give up normal life in exchange for such a
single-minded pursuit? Mark Provo’s story, we thought, might shed light
on the obsessions that so often drive human achievement.In hindsight, Provo was not the appropriate subject for such a story. I checked his Web site
briefly during our deadline editing to ensure the accuracy of the web
address that ran with the article. My chief regret now is that I didn’t
dig deeper at that time. If we had nonetheless chosen to go ahead with
the story, readers deserved a fuller picture of Mark Provo’s interests
and beliefs.
He then goes on to refute Provo’s claims in a fairly convincing manner. Here’s the one factual error in the piece:
We were able to verify one
factual error – the motel room next to Provo’s was Room 112, not Room
113. Provo also said he was 5 years old when his parents separated and
that his father died three years later. Our research staff was unable
to verify that from public records, and there was no way to verify
minor historical facts such as Provo’s assertion that his computer
arrived in Centralia by bus, not by mail. None of those facts went to
the substance of the story, but we corrected the room-number item and
reported Provo’s version of other concrete facts in last Sunday’s
newspaper.
He also makes some points about the narrative style and literary license used by Hallman:
To be sure, some matters of
interpretation are debatable. Narrative nonfiction is an art, and
reasonable practitioners disagree about how much of the author’s voice
should color a narrative’s description of reality. Hallman, for
example, wrote that when Provo thought he had cracked the Fermat
problem, “he was trapped in a bare-bones motel Centralia, Wash., motel
room, so broke he couldn’t afford a bottle of cheap champagne.” How did
Hallman know that? He asked Provo, “A big moment in your life, no?
Would you want to celebrate with champagne.” And, Hallman says, Provo
laughed and said, “Too broke.” But Provo now counters that Hallman’s
description was “baloney” and adds, “It makes you think I would drink
champagne. And yet I never drink alcohol, ever.”
So Hallman’s observation is absolutely accurate, but possibly
misleading, although in a way that has nothing to do with the substance
of the story.
The story contains a small number of passages in which the author
makes an authoritative statement derived from extensive reporting but
not precisely linked to a specific observation or quotation. Hallman
wrote that Provo “chased the proof because someone had said it couldn’t
be done,” and he recalls that as a theme running through several
conversations with Provo.
Of the four or five similar examples in the story, none is
inaccurate in the sense of facts that can be proved or disproved.
Nonetheless, Hallman agrees that in the future he will keep his wording
more concrete and limited as a way of avoiding such differences in
interpretation.
As noted above, Provo has posted a rebuttal to Hart’s post. It is available as a MD Word download from his website here. Here is the beginning of his letter:
The published comments of editor Jack Hart of the Oregonian newspaper (in his Editor’s Blog on May 23, 2006) are so skewed from the actual facts that I must provide a rigorous refutation of what he said. He is engaged in defensive and strategic action in an attempt to minimize and downplay (and hopefully make go away) what was actually a monumental failure on their part. They are now trying to “blame the victim,” by further impugning my work and my character through a selective raising of the questions at hand…
He then goes through Hart’s post line by line, noting his objections. Download and read it for the full picture of the dispute.
