The Liars’ Club
Nah, not really. Never happened. Just made it up. And you know what? It was fun. Easy too–especially compared to, say, actually trying to track down the actual Smith and actually getting her to sit down for an actual interview.
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As Glass watched his pretty new career shatter, Cable News Network and Time celebrated their journalistic union with the stillbirth of a deformed little lump of error: their report claiming that the military used nerve gas on U.S. defectors in Vietnam in Operation Tailwind. The report, aired during the premiere of NewsStand, seemed based entirely on deciding tear gas was nerve gas and on vigorously ignoring interview after interview with people who insisted it never happened.
In the ugly aftermath someone coined the phrase “Peter Arnett defense.” TV newsreaders are traditionally accused of being mere attractive talking heads, so typically they claim deep involvement in the news-gathering process. But Arnett, who narrated the Operation Tailwind report, broke new ground by arguing that he’d had nothing whatsoever to do with the script shoved into his hands, and thus was not responsible for whether it was true, untrue, or somewhere in between. He kept his job, if not his credibility.
At least Barnicle, having done his swan song, crawled off to nurse his wounds. And Glass had had the sense to burrow deep the moment scandal struck and, as far as anyone can tell, stay there. Maybe he’s wandered to the South Seas like Lord Jim, searching for that distant corner of the world where his ill fame isn’t known.
No, just the carelessness that created the situation in the first place. Writers, like anyone else, can get tired and lazy over time. It takes effort and discipline on the part of their editors to keep up the pressure for quality, particularly if the writer gains a bit of stature and can bite back. It takes gumption to walk into Mr. Weepy Nostalgia’s office and say that tomorrow’s column is recycled crap; it’s unpleasant to tell Ms. Political Insider that her day’s offering is half self-indulgent spoodle, half rehash from last week’s Daily Mail, and perhaps she might consider flopping her hands onto the keyboard and actually doing a little work next time.
But the excuses don’t change the few, simple rules that were put in place because they’re necessary to keep the profession going: You can’t steal stuff. You can’t make stuff up. In my first paragraph the sentence “Of course she was drunk” was inspired by a sentence that ran in a humor piece in the New Yorker a couple of months ago. I stuck it in because it fit well there, and I liked the idea of including a thread of plagiarism in the moral shroud I was weaving. Artsy.
