NEW YORK, New York, May 10-- The other day, I was reading a few short chapters of Booknotes, a volume of condensed interviews from the C-SPAN television program of the same name. I've plugged the "Booknotes" TV show before, and -- this being my very own column, I'll plug it again if I feel like it. It's a one-hour weekly show, airing every Sunday at 8:00 Eastern Time, in which Brian Lamb, chairman of C-SPAN, interviews the author of a recent non-fiction book -- typically, a historian, journalist, or political scientist.
The problem is that "non-fiction" does not equal "truth."
The show's been running for upwards of ten years, which means there's a lot of interesting material in the archives -- enough that the publisher has recently come out with a second book of interviews from the series.
The problem is that "non-fiction" does not equal "truth." One section of Booknotes consists of a series of interviews with former Vietnam war correspondents: Peter Arnett (I don't remember him from Vietnam, having been more interested in toy tanks than real ones at the time, but you'll undoubtedly recall his CNN broadcasts from Baghdad during the Gulf War), Neil Sheehan (who wrote A Bright Shining Lie, about Vietnam), Morley Safer (original head of CBS's Saigon bureau), and another reporter, whose name I won't mention, but you can probably figure it out with a little legwork, or by using a Web search engine.
This fourth Vietnam correspondent wrote a book that, based on his Booknotes interview, sounded well worth reading. As one of the cadre of young journalists who'd helped expose the folly of the South East Asian War Games (as a former co-worker of mine, who was there, refers to it), this guy'd had a firsthand look at a horror most of us only saw on TV.
Unfortunately, when I read the author's bio accompanying the interview, I noticed that he was now "a senior science writer at the New York Times." It was at that point that I realized that I'd seen some of this writer's work before -- in a completely misguided story for the Times Magazine, a number of years ago, entitled, "The Star Wars Spinoff." This particular bit of journalistic creative writing described several scientific projects, one of which featured my father as principal scientist -- and all of which were supposedly being performed as part of the basic research underlying Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (for youngsters who might be reading this, SDI was a defense scheme predicated on the outlandish fairytale that science could concoct a way of intercepting and destroying incoming Russian ICBMs before they had a chance to blow us to bits).
The headline often gets written first -- before the author even knows if he has a story.
Needless to say, the Times story got it all wrong. Oh, these science projects were being undertaken, true enough -- but not with Star Wars money. My dad's gallium-arsenide project was begun well before Star Wars was even a gleam in Reagan's eye -- years before he took office, in fact. The same was true of each of the other scientific investigations highlighted in the story; not a single one was being funded with SDI money. Yet the Times decided they constituted "The Star Wars Spinoff," and nothing was going to dissuade the Newspaper of Record.
(My dad was incensed at the story, despite the fact that it contained a full two-page spread that pictured him wearing a white lab coat, peering into a very impressive-looking apparatus. Most scientists would kill for that kind of publicity, I assured him. He was, and remains, unimpressed.)
A couple of years later, the same guy who'd written the "Star Wars" story came out with some equally dubious pieces touting "cold fusion" (you remember that one -- the supposed scientific bombshell that was going to solve all our energy problems). When that idea fizzled, he wrote some articles on conventional "hot" nuclear fusion -- another concept that, although it's real (it's what the sun does all day, after all), may not prove a workable source of energy in our lifetime, if ever.
I don't think this guy's an idiot -- or even, necessarily, a bad journalist. He's probably just a victim of bad editorial policy. The problem is that too often, the headline gets written first -- before the author has actually gone out and researched the story, or even knows if he has one.
Several years ago, I wrote a couple of stories for a major computer trade journal. One of these dealt with businesses that were converting "legacy" mainframe applications to client-server Unix systems. (I thought they should have stayed with the mainframes, as you know from The client-server fiasco, 6/16/98, but that's another story -- one I've already written.)
Anyhow, I was assigned the task of interviewing a couple of Information Systems managers who had made the jump. My editor told me to make sure I got them to tell me how hard it was to convert their apps from IBM MVS to Unix, how many late nights and weekends they'd worked, what kind of war stories they could tell, yada-yada-yada.
Mainstream publications can be too big to cover a small beat.
Well, when I talked to these guys, they said it was really no big deal. "We migrated one app at a time -- ported the code, debugged it, tested it for awhile, ran it in parallel with the mainframe for a few weeks, then pulled the plug on the mainframe. Sure, there were a few problems, but it really wasn't that big a deal -- it was all in a day's work!"
So I wrote the story and sent it to my editor. He called back and left a message: "I got your article, and it needs some work. Call me back ASAP." He told me to get some more war stories. So I squeezed a few feeble war stories out of these IS managers, re-wrote the piece, and sent it in again. This time, I guess it passed muster -- the editor ran the story, although he rewrote the lead so that it talked about warriors emerging from battle "with calloused feet but smiling faces." Fair enough; at least I got paid.
As in the "Star Wars" episode, this was a case of an editor who assumed his conclusion -- he wrote the headline first, then sent the reporter out to do the story. This kind of thing happens all the time. Another example that sticks in my mind is a story that ran in the Boston Globe in 1986 or so, when the MBTA (the city transit system) opened a new branch of the Orange Line, a line that ran from downtown Boston through some of the city's scruffier (read: black) neighborhoods, thence to the Jamaica Plain section of town, where I was living at the time.
I started using the new Orange Line as soon as it opened, because it provided a much faster alternative to the buses that lumbered up and down Huntington Avenue (known to regular riders as Bumpington Avenue, because of the street's horrendous number of potholes). The Orange Line was quick, clean, and efficient.
Nonetheless, a few months after it opened, the Globe ran a story, the gist of which was that the Orange Line had supposedly become a target for vandals and graffiti artists, who were allegedly spraying paint all over the subway cars, stations, and anything else they could aim their spray cans at.
The problem with that story -- as with the others I've described -- was that it, too, was completely false. I was riding the line every day, and I'd never seen a car with any graffiti or other signs of vandalism whatsoever. When pressed, the Globe ran a small retraction, admitting that the photo accompanying the story (which showed some graffiti painted on a wall) was actually taken outside a subway fence, not on MBTA property. But I'm sure far fewer people saw the retraction than the original story. The editor had simply assigned a reporter to come back with a story saying, "Look at these people in the poor neighborhoods -- give them a new subway line, and the first thing they do is go and trash it." The fact that this was entirely untrue didn't seem to matter.
In war, truth is the first casualty; but with the kind of "truth" we read every day, who needs war?
A few years ago in a Boston suburb, a garbage truck -- owned by Browning-Ferris Industries (BFI), a large waste-disposal company, and one with a lot of political enemies -- blew a radiator hose on a hot day, leaking a couple of gallons of antifreeze into the street. The next day, a story appeared in a local paper -- the headline blared, "BFI TRUCK SPILLS HAZARDOUS WASTE." Well, this was technically true -- antifreeze is classified as hazardous waste (so is your dog's flea collar, by the way -- I'm not making this up), and when you blow a radiator hose, the stuff does spill all over the ground beneath your vehicle. But come on, now -- the article made it sound as if the truck had picked up a load of radioactive material from the local nuclear power plant and intentionally dumped it all over a public thoroughfare, with reckless disregard for human health and safety, when the truth was nothing like that. What happened here was that a newspaper editor wanted to score a few cheap political points by blasting a waste-disposal company that he knew was unpopular with a lot of local people. So he ran a story that, although not a complete fabrication, was so misleading as to be meaningless.
I can think of a lot of examples, from my trade-journalist days, of situations where big, credible publications, such as the Wall Street Journal and the Boston Globe, missed the point of technology stories, simply because their technology reporters didn't have enough day-to-day knowledge of the subjects they were covering. Many of the developments that my colleagues and I, working at a specialized publication that focused on one particular segment of the computer and software market, were able to interpret correctly, were misinterpreted by the mainstream papers. This isn't to say that those publications lacked journalistic acumen -- just that they were too big to cover a small beat. When the big papers tried to cover our specialty, they blew it.
What all of this is saying is that you can't believe what you read. It's also saying that accurate journalism starts at the bottom -- with the journalists who are actually going out, gathering facts, thinking them through, specializing in an area and really learning that area, and just calling it as they see it. Inaccurate journalism, on the other hand, starts at the top -- with editors who assume their conclusions, and with publishers who have an axe to grind, a grudge to bear, or a political position to flog. The cliche goes that in war, truth is the first casualty. Well, that may be -- but with the kind of "truth" we read every day, who needs war?
Copyright © 1999 John J. Kafalas