My Columbia Journalism Review online column for this week looks at unreliable sources. An excerpt is below; click on the headline to read the full column.
Sources of Error
He spoke with a polished English accent, once shared a crème brûlée torte with Hillary Clinton, and spent part of the summer officiating tennis at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Charles Carlson gave every indication that he was a student worth watching at the University of Minnesota when he sat down for an interview with the Minnesota Daily, a student newspaper, during the Democratic National Convention in August. Carlson was an at-large delegate at the convention. He later announced his candidacy for the Minneapolis City Council.
“He was a Beijing Olympics tennis official and is a University graduate student, GLBT rights advocate and director of operations at a Minneapolis architecture firm,” read the Daily’s story about him. “Is there anything Charles Carlson doesn’t do?”
This week the paper answered its own question: tell the truth. An investigation published on Monday by the Daily revealed that Carlson had lied about many of his achievements.
There was no communal torting with Hillary, and he didn’t officiate at the Olympics. Carlson grew up and went to school in Minnesota, which meant his transcripts from Phillips Exeter Academy, Princeton University and two schools in England were forged. When confronted with the evidence, he admitted that he suffers from a mental illness for which he was once institutionalized. The English accent disappeared, too.
“I spent six years being a gay nothing that people just made fun of, and then when I was discharged I found out that people would believe anything you told them,” he told the Daily.
Carlson is far from alone in discovering that members of the public and journalists, be they student reporters or veteran scribes, will often take the facts at face value. An old saying in journalism holds that, “If your grandmother tells you she loves you, check it out.” It’s good advice, but rarely followed…
