Classical Hoax
“News, hard features, must be based on absolute truth. It leaves no room for creativity, past the ability of the reporter to use good and engaging language in expressing the truth that he is reporting.”
She is black. She is young. She is beautiful. And, yes, she is American. And from all the accounts of her classical who-dun-it, she is as brilliant as the Northern Star. Her name is Janet Cooke, and she is in the news. Here is the story: The 26-year-old Miss Cooke joined the Washington Post after spending two and half years as a reporter on a small city newspaper. Washington Post is a big newspaper, and it has the reputation of leading the exposes in the Watergate scandal which led to the resignation of Richard Nixon as the American president. For a paper of that stature, a reporter of Miss Cooke’s little experience should be kept under close supervision and scrutiny. This was not the case. The Post gave its reporters carte blanche to report scoops attributed to deep background sources. Miss Cooke, who as the story will show, is extremely intelligent, must have seen the laxity in news control at the Post and, as a result, was able to hatch a master plan that has landed her squarely in practically every newspaper throughout the world. News, hard and features, must be based on absolute truth. It leaves no room for creativity, past the ability of the reporter to use good and engaging language in expressing the truth that he is reporting. But not for Miss Cooke.
Perhaps, thinking of ways to make a name for herself and distinguish herself as an exemplary journalist, the young lady spent time thinking hard and came up with a plot for a classical hoax. What she did was to sketch a plot that had little, if any, truth and write compelling features on it. She dreamt up a story of an eight-year-old boy addicted to heroin and sold it to her employers at the Washington Post. The boy, whom Miss Cooke called Jimmy, became a fixture in the front page of the Post for several weeks as Miss Cooke painted a pathetic picture of an eight-year-old boy addicted to heroin, and whose parents stood by as the boy injected the heinous drug. Called “Jimmy’s World,” the story gained attention of all and sundry and immediately kicked up a violent storm. The mayor of Washington, D.C., where Miss Cooke’s fictitious Jimmy lived, went to the Post and demanded from the editor of the paper that he would like to know where Jimmy lived. He said he would like to save the boy from his parents by getting him proper medical attention. The Washington Post refused, arguing privilege of press freedom. The mayor reacted with indignation, styling the Post’s Jimmy a fiction.
In any case, the Post soon put forward the story and Miss Cooke for the Pulitzer Prize, the American most important awards for journalism excellence. For some reason, despite opposition from certain members of the Pulitzer board at the Columbia University in New York her nomination went through. But Miss Cooke’s happiness did not last a whole day. In publishing her background, the Associated Press reporter her claim that she received a master’s degree from a university in which she spent only one year of undergraduate. When the university saw the report and checked its records, it found that Miss Cooke was lying and wrote to the Pulitzer board to refute Miss Cooke’s claim. The Pulitzer board immediately got in touch with the Post which then found that it hired Miss Cooke on a string of false biographical claims. Confronted and grilled for some 10 hours, Miss Cooke broke down and admitted that her biographical claims were not only false, but that her excellently written Jimmy’s World series was only a figment of her resourceful imagination. That’s when the cat jumped out of the bag. The rest is now history, from which even more resourceful and more imaginative writers will spin tens of novels of Miss Cooke’s who-dun-it in the coming months.
Already, Miss Cooke’s escapade has become the talk of the journalism world, raising fundamental questions on the practice of journalism and giving the Washington Post such a dark black eye that the paper would of necessity spend months, if not years, wearing if off. It is an accident that Miss Cooke is an American, writing for an American newspaper which course, is guilty of reckless oversight. Anyhow, Miss Cooke’s creative fraud raises important questions for journalism in a universal context: How should editors relate to their reporters and judge news? How much healthy sceptism must editors entertain in handling news copies from their reporters? How much check must the watchdog exercise? These are the questions and others that Miss Cooke’s hoax raise. And they are questions that stretch to the limit the whole understanding of the practice of journalism. A practice in which trust and credibility are the hallmarks suffers here and abroad from incredulity and lack of trust from the public that patronises the news. Already, amny readers and viewers of the news relate to information with the bias that no news is exactly true in totally. Even the most intelligent observers of the press conclude readily that journalists like to exaggerate and that, more often than not, they like to lie.
These critics are correct to some extent, in the sense that some reporters like Miss Cooke subjugate the canon of their profession for the truth to benefit their selfishness by creating situation that they will like their readers to see as the truth. That the exposure of Miss Cooke came because she told a lie too many doesn’t help the argument that most journalists stay true to the ethics of the calling. A good way for editors to restore public confidence in the truth of the news will be more cautious and skeptical vetting of sources of important stories brought to their desks. The editors at the Washington Post have not tried to defend the indefensible still be very harsh on them for failing to sight Miss Cooke’s hoax which ran for weeks, and which the paper presented to the Pulitzer board for excellence in journalism. At least the paper should have winked on the side of humaneness by insisting that Miss Cooke must tell it the identity of the boy in the story so that his life could be saved.
The Post’s worst guilt is that the paper seemed to have cared more about winning prizes and outplaying other papers so that it would be regarded as a paper practicing the best journalism, while closing its eyes to the human complication involved in the story. It is elementary that when a newspaper exposes cases of human suffering, the goal is to end the suffering by alerting the public and pointing to the area of the suffering. A mere literary adventure in encouraging a story like Miss Cooke’s Jimmy’s World serves no useful purpose, even when true, if a paper cannot point to solution and end to the suffering of the subject. Why did the post think that the story was worth all the hoopla? As for Janet Cooke, it is sad that she expended such brilliance as she displayed in her hoax in a disreputable pursuit, like cooking up a fallacy. The young lady entered a wrong profession, not that of a writer – for she has proved that she is one of the best – but as a journalist. Her Jimmy’s World could have made an excellent plot for a bestseller.
©Sunday Concord, May 3, 1981
(Pp.122-124)
