Yesterday my former colleague Rona Kobell did a courageous thing: Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, she recounted the details of a profound professional embarrassment.
Assigned to write a profile of a successful area businessman, she dutifully interviewed him and wrote the article, which was published in The Sun. The problem, which came to light almost immediately upon publication, was that the businessman, giving in to vainglory, had lied to her. Had lied to her egregiously. Had lied to her on a level with Mary McCarthy’s famous slam of Lillian Hellman: “Every word she says is a lie, and that includes and and the.”
Another reporter was assigned, and after investigation, The Sun published a full account of the subject’s falsehoods. The Sun did not fire Ms. Kobell, and she has gone on, at the paper and from the paper, to a responsible career as a journalist, never since mistaking naïve stenography for reportage.
In the CJR article, Ms. Kobell nobly takes the fall for the whole debacle. It was her primary responsibility to be skeptical and to verify the statements of fact in her article. But hers was not the only responsibility. She had an editor, who failed to be skeptical and press for verification. And her article sailed through The Sun’s copy desk and reached print without encountering annoying questions.
It is clear that not enough of this is being done, as Rolling Stone has discovered with its article on sexual assault at the University of Virginia, or New York magazine with its too-good-to-be-true article about the 17-year-old multimillionaire.