The Liars' Stage: The Fabricators and Plagiarists of the News World

The latest liar to strut and fret his hour upon the stage is Claas Relotius. Joining the ranks of disgraced former journalists like Janet Cooke, Stephen Glass, and Jayson Blair, Relotius has achieved the ultimate in fallacies and falsehoods. But why? Why don’t these men and women choose to instead go the fiction route rather than to risk (and fail) at the task of preserving the truth? At a time when TIME magazine has named journalists as the Persons of the Year for 2018, it is somewhat ironic that the news media now cover a non-journalist.

(Unearned) Prizes and Awards

The names listed above represent the cowardice and not only that, the subjectivity of a profession that is rife with bias. Outside of the bounds of reality, each of them has stepped out and been outed as the fabricators that they are. There is no excuse to go against the objectivity of the journalistic realm. With people like Cooke and Relotius who forfeited a Pulitzer Prize and whose CNN Journalist of the Year award hangs in question, respectively, they stole those accolades. Rightfully, Teresa Carpenter received the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. Instead of looking at the facts of reality and reporting truths, each of these men and women emoted. Their emotional capacity permitted them to feel instead of think. Their whim-worship allowed them to show that they had baked the cake while in truth, they had stolen it from the store.

Villains for the Truth

What’s sad is that the possibility to earn money, gain fame, and any other significant icing on that cake was built on invention when these ex-journalists could have just been honest. For former journalists like Relotius, it is like sports figures who get caught for doping. As it stands currently, performance enhancement drugs are outlawed in many athletic organizations. In time, this may change. But the analogy between the ex-journalists is that they could have just gone into fiction to begin with and not had to worry about getting into so much trouble. The best way to view ex-journalists is to strip them of all credibility and honors and view them as villains of the truth.

The Mind in the Media

The psychological basis for such figures remains for their psychiatrists. However, to view the character of these people who have perpetrated the fraud against the populace, one can surmise that their mind states showed signs of cracks and fissures. Their ideals beginning in their careers must not have been to write fraud. They may have had a clear ideal of the gravity of their profession and how to best position themselves. Fabricator and plagiarist Jayson Blair became the second African-American editor-in-chief of the Maryland University student paper The Diamondback. Did this liar plan on deceiving his readers in just a few years after dropping out of college? And then to write a book about how he employs fictional elements (narrative, characterization, dialogue) that’s intent was to show that his superiors pushed him over the edge shows what, exactly? This is the ultimate example of evasion. All of these men and women showed complete irrationality in their efforts to bring the news.

An Ethical Breach

It is beyond trepidation that these one time legitimate writers ever could say that they didn’t know what they were doing. They clung to the ideals of “I can get away with this. I’ll just present my work in such a way that no one will notice my avoidance of stating complete facts.” In the film, Shattered Glass (2003), associate editor for the New Republic Stephen Glass pulls from thin air mostly false stories. His ambition was not to blame. Nor was it his selfishness. In fact, it was his unselfishness and moral myopia that lead him to shame and disgrace. Glass would go on to pen a fictionalized retelling of his time at TNR. What was his motive? To lie, cheat, and steal ideas and then get caught, face public scrutiny, and dishonor and then sign a book deal that would delineate the entire situation? These emotionalists formerly known as journalists crawled through the muck of their own fake news that may have been witty, coherent, and even moving. The only thing was that all of it was made up to sate their taste in misleading and misguiding. Their actions, though not criminal, constitute an ethical breach. All of them and others like them, display a morality that fits with the range of the moment. They saw the opportunity to invent and be clever and win over their reading audiences, much less their editors and fellow writers. They employed great diction, metaphor, poetic touches just to hide the empty shell of their words.

Acceptance

That old line attributed to Abraham “Honest Abe” Lincoln that “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of time” remains true when talking about this sordid lot. The reason that they obtained and held positions remained the fact that they had some sort of spark when they started. They exuded signs of productiveness and the ability to meet deadlines and come up with material that surpassed their peers at times. Yet, all the while, they had been lying to themselves, primarily. They looked themselves in the mirror knowing that what they involved themselves in was vicious. They accepted those prizes and accolades and money, by the way, by paying to their subconscious counterfeit bills. In their minds, they saw themselves as the saviors of their given publication. Instead of staying clean and reporting about what actually happened, these figures showed complete disregard for all that is good and honest.

A Desire to Be Fired

What drives such people like this is the idea that they want to get caught, allegedly. They wish to make a mountain of lies only to see that summit crumble to ruin. Smiles and laughs and jokes cropped up when they did their dirt. Once their misdeeds saw the light of day, only frowns, tears, and mutterings of weak apologies remained. In the aftermath, each of these once credible writers all had to confess that their ideas came from the wisps of clouds in their corrupted souls rather than the cold, hard facts that laid on the ground before them. In efforts to seem charming and intelligent, these ex-journalists gave off nothing more than fodder for actual journalists to apply their objectivity.

Emotionalism

The fact that they emoted shows that the profession ought not change, but increased level of inspection ought to be instilled in the individual. It is the individual that must find for him or herself the power of discernment. Journalists ought to be on the vanguard for protecting and preserving truth. To have them only look at the sparkly bits of the story, including the hot button issues like drugs and immigration (Cooke and Relotius, respectively) should drive the writer to ensure that every fact is nailed down and there is no room for invention.

The Easy Route

The pressure that ex-journalists like Cooke and Blair said that they experienced during their time at the papers for which they wrote is no excuse for their messy, sloppy, and emotional behaviors. The lies that mounted up because of them brought a lowered respect for the profession and the people who work in it. As a result of them never stopping to think about what they willed themselves into, they stumbled and fell in a trap that they set up for themselves. By taking the easy route of just falsifying their reports, they held onto something. It was an intangible thing called self-deception.

Before they had the opportunity to lie to their fellow writers, editors, publishers, and the people who read their works, they had to first lie to themselves. They started out with a few fabricated stories here and there. They then graduated to more elaborate ways to express their inability to live up to the facts. Then, they just took out the governor and made up entire stories. That is a level of selflessness that is staggering. They had no self-esteem to keep them focused on the truth. They lacked the very essence of what it means to be an objective author.

Bastion of Reality

Journalism is the bastion of reality and facts writ large on the world stage. It is a meeting of mind and matter that tells a story that is supposed to be true. The ex-journalists that chose to put their feelings ahead of their thoughts ought to be publicly ostracized, not given book deals and licenses to practice law (in the case of Glass who was ultimately denied from practicing law in the state of California). The men and women of the press, those who attend J school, the ones in the press box, are the defenders of trustworthiness. They are tasked with the responsibility to convey to the reader, listener, or viewer the facts and only the facts no matter how much perceived “pressure” they might be under or what flowery language they can concoct.

Origin Stories

None of these former journalists started out the way that they ended up, actually. They had to go through a whole array of defeats to reach the doldrums of their depravity. The facts slipped from their minds like water flowing from a palm. They used their status as purveyors of truth in order to pull the wool over the eyes of the very people that they counted on for sustenance. Their betrayal of the trust of millions of people only goes to show that subjectivity is a disease. But it is often a self-sickening pathogen. It may lie dormant during the formative years. There might be a fib here a false truth there. But the most treacherous behavior becomes manifest when adults who never grasped the meaning of objectivity get hired by premiere news agencies. For those who live for the inverted pyramid, this particular aspect of the field is of most importance. It is chief because all of the facts rest on it. The unbiased, unvarnished truth is what allows the mind to process information. It allows the brain to sift through what is garbage and what is gold. When ex-journalists begin their descent into subjectivity, it is a sign of psychological impairment. These people are too weak minded to stand on their own nobility of thought and thus engage in anything they can find. They find a shiny news story and go out to cover it. They might claim that they met with people in the desert or that an eight-year-old was a heroin addict or that Jukt Micronics was a real website.

The Virtuous Journalist

All of these examples point to the emptiness of virtues that they should have tried harder to understand about themselves and corrected. Instead, they go down in history as the liars who couldn’t get the story straight. All they had to do was to tell their editors, “you know what, I can’t cover this story without making it fiction.” Of course it’s deeper and much simpler than that as well. They had the chance to prove to themselves that the truth would make them whole.

Objectivity would have permitted them the power to use the press. For such a sacred field as the Fourth Estate, they should’ve kept their minds clear for the rationality, independence, integrity, and honesty that should’ve saved their jobs and more important, their frames of mind. For future journalists who wish to not end up like the ones above, rationality will keep them within the bounds of reason. Independence will bring about the idea of standing on one’s own convictions. Integrity will usher in the idea that they can’t fabricate something that their own consciousness knows to be untrue. And honesty will present to people with which one deals the fact that you cannot present what is not real into existence. These virtues stand as the way for real journalists to enter the gates of a most hallowed profession.

Earned

While they wished to go out with applause and the crowd swooning, these former newspeople will exit the stage with jeers and boos. And they earned them.