May 2, 2004

Times FeatureMurray Frymer

They make things up

By Murry Frymer
Staff Writer

When I was a little boy living in Toronto, my father would take me to religious services on the High Holy Days. But one year, in a caper instigated by a jovial friend of my father, the three of us left the services and went to the movies instead.

What a sin! My father swore me to secrecy. I agreed to never tell my mother.

But about a half century later, searching for a column to write in the Mercury News during the advent of the High Holy Days, I remembered this indiscretion and retold the tale, now with the pleasure of having enjoyed a secret adventure with my dad.

I had kept the news from my mom, who lived in the Midwest now. My sister, however, read the article to her to get her reaction. Mom was not upset.

“Murry is a writer,” she said. “He makes things up.”

I remember this now when it seems lots of journalists are being ousted for making things up. Just lately, Jack Kelley, a renowned foreign correspondent from USA Today, the largest circulation newspaper in the land, was fired for making up numerous stories over the years. Two top editors at the newspaper also left and more seem likely to follow.

Of course, one of the more celebrated of the newspaper shocks happened some months ago when Jayson Blair, an up-and-coming young reporter for the New York Times was found to have made up lots of stories, which he either never covered or borrowed from the reporting of other newspapers. There, too, his shame was followed by the resignation of two top editors, the executive editor and the managing editor.

There have been lots of such tales. Some years back a Washington Post reporter won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the street life of a city woman. Only then was it learned that the subject of the series of stories did not exist. It was all fiction. The prize had to be returned.

I could continue on this tack for some length. That is not my point. But having enjoyed a few decades in this newspaper business, I am somewhat amused at all the shock—shock!—in the nation’s newsrooms, suddenly made aware of misbehavior in their midst. My mom never worked a day in journalism, but she knew the game. My story about my dad was true, of course, but it is wise to appreciate that when writer puts pen or computer to paper, sometimes the art of telling a good story can get in the way of the truth.

Not that your morning journal is a pack of lies, depending, of course, on which paper you buy. Some readers seem to prefer a collection of fiction that can be more interesting, thrilling, or just tied to the reader’s own set of biases, than what is purportedly more honest. Pick your poison. (The so-called supermarket tabloids outsell other newspapers by the millions.)

In my early days of journalism, there was at least less shock. Editors would wink and prefer to go with a “good story.”

I remember an assignment I was given as a fledgling reporter in Cleveland. I was sent to a suburban hospital to tell the tale of a high school football player who had suffered a serious leg injury. Not really much of a story. I talked to the boy and to his parents and to the doctor, came back and wrote what was probably a dull story. The next day I looked eagerly in the suburban section to see if it had been run.

Indeed it had, with my byline no less. It began: “You’ll never walk again, Scott,” the doctor said somberly looking down at the tear-stained young athlete… “ I flushed. I had not written that, nor was it true. I ran to my editor who smiled at my concern. “”Murry,” he said. “The first rule of journalism is to get people to read your story.”

And that rule has served many in the trade well. William Randolph Hearst made up the facts concerning the sinking of the American ship, the “Maine,” which led to war with Spain. And back in Cleveland, a newspaper printed front-page accusations that a local doctor, Sam Sheppard, had murdered his wife. Sheppard was indeed found guilty, but later released when a judge ruled that it was the newspaper’s questionable “reporting” that had convicted him.

In recent years, something called the New Journalism, practiced by such heralded writers as the New York Times’ Gay Talese, decided it could fabricate dialogue and detail in telling stories that were ostensibly true. The made up parts just made it a good read.

In much daily journalism today, important officials are quoted giving important information, but then just identified as “a reputable source” or “an informed source.” This kind of anonymity gives unscrupulous reporters, encouraged by their editors, a kind of a pass to skip the niceties and difficulties of factual journalism.

We still don’t know who “Deep Throat” is, but that anonymous source indicted President Nixon some years back. Messrs. Woodward and Bernstein, who based much of their Watergate reporting on this informant, tell us they will reveal his name after he dies. Sure. Who can dispute it then?

Columnists at the Boston Globe and Chicago Tribune and elsewhere have recently lost their jobs to this urge to tell good stories. And many news people will pluck out details of others they have known through the years. Many a successful career has relied on this gamesmanship. We used to call it “piping” in the old days. But we never called it shocking.

And then, sometimes more deceptive, are all the games that newspapers play to NOT tell stories. The New York Times ignored, then downplayed the surprising stories in the Toledo Blade, whose reporters delineated months of war crimes by a crack American unit during the Vietnam War. The Times finally caught up with the story, waiting to insert its own reporting into the Blade’s expose. Major papers hate to be “beaten” on a story and may, for ego’s sake, avoid looking in that direction. The Blade recently won a Pulitzer for its reporting. Of course, despite what my mother thought, I never fibbed in print myself. I must admit that some people did wonder about that when I ran a series of columns in the Mercury written by my cat, Hershey. A cat columnist? How could this be? Well, Hershey’s columns created greater interest than those that carried my own byline. So yes, he wrote every word. Don’t believe my mother.