Recent Misdeeds Fuel Public Distrust Of Media -- Cnn Retraction Latest Embarrassment For Press

Truth may be stranger than fiction, but some reporters are finding it hard to keep them separate.

With public distrust of the media running unusually high, CNN yesterday apologized to viewers and Vietnam veterans for "serious faults" in its reporting and retracted a story alleging that U.S. commandos used nerve gas to kill American defectors during the war. The two main producers of the report, Jack Smith and April Oliver, were fired.

It was the latest in a series of major embarrassments.

Journalists also were dismayed this week when The Cincinnati Enquirer published a front-page apology to Chiquita Brands International, saying reporter Michael Gallagher stole Chiquita employees' voice-mail messages and used them as the basis of critical articles. The Enquirer fired Gallagher and agreed to pay the banana company $10 million.

Other recent disclosures showed that a columnist and a young writer at two respected publications had made up stories - using fictitious people, phony settings and fabricated quotes.

The swift firings of Boston Globe columnist Patricia Smith and New Republic reporter Stephen Glass served as reminders that such fakery is unacceptable in a business that prides itself on credibility.

Experts say these recent incidents are the exception, not the rule.

"I wouldn't go overboard on this," says Ed Guthman, University of Southern California journalism professor, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1950 while he was a reporter at The Seattle Times. "There have always been some reporters who did this (invented material), and I think it says a lot more about human nature than anything else."

But for others, these recent cases were confirmation that a disturbing cultural trend in America - the blurring of lines between fact and fiction - may be shadowing the news business.

Pressures of competition

One common theme in these embarrassments is the desire to make a big splash in the roiling waters of media competition. CNN's nerve-gas story was used to attract attention to the premiere of "NewsStand."

In her farewell column to Boston Globe readers, Smith said: "I wanted the pieces to jolt, to be talked about, to leave the reader indelibly impressed. And sometimes, as a result of trying to do too much at once and cutting corners, they didn't. So I tweaked them to make sure they did."

Another common theme is the failure of editors to heed warning signs until it was too late.

Boston Globe editors first suspected Smith was writing fiction nearly three years ago but failed to act on it. The problem, says Globe Editor Matthew Storin, is that similar questions had been raised about his star columnist, Mike Barnicle - who, unlike Smith, is white.

"I had this very talented black woman. . . . How then can I take action against this woman under this circumstance?" Storin told his paper.

Storin ordered a review procedure for all columnists that ultimately led to Smith's downfall. Storin says his staff has reviewed 364 Barnicle columns and found them factual.

But Globe editors could not verify the accuracy of six columns Smith wrote. They confronted her and, when she admitted that material in four columns had been invented, they fired her.

News as entertainment

"The confusion of fact and fiction is turning journalism news into entertainment," says columnist and author Richard Reeves. "And you saw proof of that in the Boston Globe and New Republic stories. . . . You saw writers feeling they had to juice up their stories."

In the New Republic case, a monthlong inquiry by the magazine found that 27 of the 41 articles that Stephen Glass had written for it over the past three years contained at least partly made-up material.

Glass, 25, was fired after confessing he had "embellished" a May 18 story about computer hackers. He did not contest the investigation's findings.

New Republic Editor Charles Lane told The Washington Post that Glass "deliberately deceived" the magazine's fact-checkers with forged notes, fabricated documents, fake press releases and a bogus Web site.

Still, it is stunning that some of his more outlandish creations - from the First Church of George Herbert Walker Christ to a conservative conference depicted as a drug-addled Animal House - were not detected sooner, given the buzz about Glass' too-perfect anecdotes.

Reporting not valued

"This confusion (about fact and fiction) is a problem," says Tom Goldstein, dean of the Columbia School of Journalism. "Some newspapers today value writing more than reporting. You don't hear people saying now that someone is a hell of a fact-finder. You hear, `That person is a hell of a writer.' "

To be a writer in this culture sometimes means shading the truth. This is a world, after all, in which consumers are hard-pressed to tell the difference between the truth or fiction of movies such as "JFK," TV news "re-enactments" of car crashes that never took place and so-called "nonfiction novels."

None of this is particularly new: Some trace it back to Truman Capote's influential "In Cold Blood" and the so-called New Journalism of the 1960s, which blended nonfiction narrative with colorful, fiction-writing techniques. Writers such as Tom Wolfe built their careers on such writing, and although many newspapers made a point of discouraging New Journalism in the '70s and '80s, it has permeated the culture at large.

"The best journalism often reads like a novel, and it's hard to tell truth from fiction sometimes," says David Rosenthal, who heads Simon & Schuster's trade-book division. "Telling the truth remains important, but the way you tell it has broadened, and that's not necessarily a bad thing."

It all depends on how much you're willing to believe. Oliver Stone's "JFK" may have been only partially factual, but that didn't hurt the movie at the box office. Kathryn Harrison's "The Kiss," a best-selling memoir of incest, sparked accusations from some critics that she had made up the story. Joe McGuiness' biography of Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., was filled with intimate conversations the author couldn't possibly have witnessed.

Rising expectations

"The pressure to make stories about the real seem perfectly packaged and seamless is there," says Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University. "If anything contributes to these incidents, it's the rising expectation of the juicy quote, the colorful character, the copy that sparkles because of tough competition with other media."

A 1997 poll showed that 56 percent of Americans believe news reporting is often inaccurate. The numbers, compiled by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, were up more than 20 percentage points from a similar poll in 1985.

"We don't live in a particularly righteous or moral culture," says Matt Storin, the Globe editor who fired Smith. "And all of these things . . . these disturbing incidents . . . contribute to a blurred line of morality."

Information from The Washington Post and The Associated Press is included in this report.

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Misleading reports

Recent incidents involving inaccurate reports at major media companies:

-- CNN: CNN yesterday retracted its story that the U.S. military used deadly nerve gas during a Vietnam-era mission in Laos to kill American defectors. CNN said an internal investigation concluded that its joint report with Time magazine could not be concluded; apologized to viewers, Time and U.S. military personnel; and fired two producers.

-- Cincinnati Enquirer: The Cincinnati Enquirer on Sunday ran a front-page apology to Chiquita Brands International, saying its stories questioning the company's business practices were untrue and based on stolen voice mail. The newspaper fired the lead reporter and agreed to pay more than $10 million to settle any claims against it by the company, even though no lawsuit had been filed.

-- Boston Globe: Columnist Patricia Smith, a 1998 Pulitzer Prize finalist, was forced to resign last month after admitting she made up people and quotes in four columns this year. The American Society of Newspaper Editors withdrew her 1998 Distinguished Writing Award.

-- New Republic: Editors at the magazine apologized to readers last month after discovering in May that associate editor Stephen Glass invented all or part of 27 articles. Glass was fired after confessing he had "embellished" a story about computer hackers in the May 18 issue.

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. Perceptions of press .

The Pew Research Center's survey was based on telephone interviews of 1,003 adults from Feb. 6 to Feb. 9, 1997. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

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. Press accuracy: . News organizations get the facts straight . 1985 - 55% . 1997 - 37% .

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. Stories are often . inaccurate . 1985 - 34% . 1997 - 56% .

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. Press fairness . In dealing with political and social issues, news organizations deal fairly with all sides . 1985 - 34% . 1997 - 27% .

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. In dealing with political and social issues, news organizations tend to favor one side . 1985 - 53% . 1997 - 67% .

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. Source: Pew Research Center for The People & The Press, National Social Trust survey .