What fuels the need for people to intricately construct lies and illusions about their own lives, thereby risking exposure, ignominy or worse?
Ask Joseph J. Ellis, the noted historian and author of “Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation,” who admitted recently that he had lied to his students and others when he said that he had been a combat soldier in Vietnam. The result was that he has been suspended for a year without pay from Mount Holyoke, the college in western Massachusetts where has taught since 1972. More than that, the incident has sparked a national debate about academic integrity.
Professor Ellis’ problem was that his book won the much-coveted Pulitzer Prize. In the US, you win the Pulitzer, as a writer, journalist or researcher, and you become a public figure. And the media have a penchant for digging into the backgrounds of public figures. Thus, when the Boston Globe began to look into Ellis’ claims that he had been a Vietnam vet, it was a matter of time before he was exposed.
The lies Professor Ellis told students, and later journalists, were not confined to Vietnam, but included tall tales about scoring a winning touchdown with a high-school football team for which he had not played. Ellis was not accused of fabrications in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, or in the lectures he delivered in his course at Holyoke, “Vietnam and American Culture.” That would have been beyond the pale. He was simply accused of lying about his personal life.
Holyoke’s president, Joanne Creighton, in suspending Ellis, said: “Perpetuated over many years, his lie about himself clearly violates the ethics of our profession and the integrity we expect of all our members of our community. Misleading students is wrong and nothing can excuse it.” Ms. Creighton added that Ellis, who is barred from enjoining the faculty till the fall of 2002, “can keep his library card.”
Since the Globe’s article appeared in June, the Ellis case has been a frequent topic of newspaper editorials and commentary, causing many in the academic community to re-examine their ethical codes and disciplinary procedures.
Was Holyoke’s rebuke of Ellis too strong, and was his punishment out of proportion to his offense? That depends on whether the man was, as I see him, a harmless pathological liar. Clearly, he did not violate any of the rules of that holy of holies, academic research, by plagiarizing others’ work or fabricating facts. That kind of breach - a horrendous crime by any definition - is often punishable by something approximating a life sentence: the offender is thrown out of the profession and he becomes some kind of outcast for the rest of his life.
Ironically, this happened to two journalists at the Boston Globe itself not quite four years ago. There was first Mike Barnacle, a popular columnist who was caught by his editors appropriating material from a book by the stand-up comic George Carlan. Globe editors to columnist Mike Barnacle: Sorry, Mike, using quotes without attribution constitutes plagiarism.
And then came Patricia Smith, another Globe in-house columnist, who was caught, this time not plagiarizing, but fabricating quotes out of thin air.
Both columnists were out, and the unmentionable things their fellow journalists - who felt those two disgraced not only themselves but their profession as well - had to say about them were so gross that Madonna wouldn’t have dreamed of putting them in a video.
Around the same time the Globe scandal broke, Steven Glass, a young investigative reporter carving out a successful career for himself at the New Republic, found himself in trouble when one of the editors there noticed something amiss in one of his articles. Fact checkers looked into it. Sure enough, Glass had fabricated not only quotes, but attributed them to non-existent sources. More fact checking into his previously published pieces revealed a similar pattern. Predictably, Glass was fired, with no prospect of his ever again being able to ingratiate himself with the profession.
The most brazen, and well-known, act of betrayal of one’s craft as a reporter is, of course, that of Janet Cook.
On April 14, 1981, the Washington Post announced discreetly, though proudly, in a front-page story that one of its writers had won the Pulitzer Prize. On a jump page inside, the Post showed a picture of the writer, Janet Cook, a young and strikingly attractive African-American woman, standing on the roof of the Post building, posed against the city skyline, hair blowing in the wind.
The feature story for which Cook won the Pulitzer, published as a three-part series, was titled “Jimmy’s World,” a harrowing narrative of an 8-year heroin addict in Southeast Washington, whose mother’s boyfriend, “Ron”, allegedly had been injecting the drug into his veins.
Again, you’re a Pulitzer Prize winner and reporters want to know who you really are. The more they dug into Cook’s background, the more they discovered a tissue of lies. Her academic credentials were bogus: her past professional achievements were made up. And it did not take long for the editors at the Washington Post to realize that, lo and behold, the whole Jimmy story was fabricated.
Cook, who was summarily fired, had deceived her readers, disgraced her profession, mortified her newspaper and, of course, destroyed her career. (The last we heard of Janet Cook was that she was working as a checkout operator at a supermarket in Cleveland, Ohio.)
Fabrication and plagiarism - two unpardonable acts.
Take fabrication. Those of us engaged in stringing words together for a living, especially in journalism, become aware, early in our careers, not only of the gravity of our work but also of the responsibility that comes attached to it.
It does not matter what happens in a totalitarian state, where the press is muzzled and the system is based on mendacity as a way of life. But a free society derives its freedom from the ability of a citizen to make free choices based on the free and unadulterated flow of information. When that information is restricted, or in this case twisted, those choices are not really free - nor, as a consequence, is the citizen.
And plagiarism is doubly egregious. If you do not feel appalled by plagiarism, or don’t know what the fuss is all about, then you have not been the victim of an audacious plagiarist, who appropriates your material as his own, attaches his name to it, and publishes it on a permanent page, all his own. A writer who sees his work kidnapped, and attributed to another person, feels violated at his very core. (I speak from experience.)
We don’t know what motivates liars, as neurotics, to fabricate stories; or plagiarists, as predators, to steal other people’s work. Neither act, to be sure, is murder, nor, as larceny, is it grand. But both are justifiably seen as serious enough offenses that those who perpetrate them, at least in our line of work, get axed. As they indeed should. No questions asked.
