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Blue
‘Jimmy’
Have Averted Disaster
By Laurie Phillips
Had things happened differently,
we may never have learned Janet Cooke's name.
Fact is, we do know who she
is, because on Sept. 28,1980, The Washington Post ran a front-page
story she wrote about an 8-year-old
heroin addict named Jimmy.
The words she wrote -- more
than 2,000 of them -- were compelling reading, so much so that they garnered
the attention of the committee that awards Pulitzer prizes. According
to a 28-page ombudsman's report written by Bill Green for The Washington
Post, Cooke received a phone call from her editors on April 3, 1981,
informing her that she had
won a Pulitzer for her story. On April 14, less than a day after the
awards were publicly announced,
the report says, Cooke confirmed to her editors what they suspected
was true, and agreed that she wouldn't
accept the prize.
Jimmy never existed.
How is it that the story got
past the sharp eyes of copy editors and made it to print? That's
the
question posed by William G. Connolly,
a former senior
editor at The New York Times who
developed a comprehensive
policy on ethics and conflicts of
interest for the paper's news department.
"It is a cautionary tale for
all newspaper editors, especially copy editors," Connolly said.
Eighty people, during two
sessions at the ACES national conference in Long Beach, were invited to
examine Cooke's story as it appeared in print and discuss the problems
they found in it.
Participants found that quite
a few elements of The story did not make sense. Why didn't any of
Jimmy's teachers notice the heroin tracks "freckling the baby-smooth skin
of his thin brown arms"?
Why would someone shoot up the boy, knowing he couldn't pay for his habit himself?
Could Jimmy
really be an
8-year-old fourth grader, considering
his truancy from
school?
Why does his
mother's English seem to fluctuate between "street speak" and proper English
-
within the same sentence?
Laurie Phillips is a recent graduate and an on-call copy editor at the San Jose Mercury News. She can be reached at lauriep@rocketmail.com.
-------------------------
And why would someone let a
reporter watch him get a child high?
"It seems to me," Connolly
said, "that there is little that's impossible here, but there's a lot that's
implausible."
Where were the copy editors to ask
these questions?
The ombudsman's report suggests
that the sharp level of skepticism with which editors are taught to approach
stories may have been dulled in Cooke's case.
Her editors had asked Cooke to reveal neither Jimmy's nor his mother's identities. The report says that the dozens of stories she submitted before "Jimmy's World" were lauded by her supervisors.
Editors may have more readily believed the story because Cooke had black skin, a fact that may have gotten her more access to such a story than white reporters would find.A reporter's track record of turning in accurate, brilliantly written stories shouldn't mean his or her newest one will be flawless, Green's report says. And Connolly said the process by which the story was printed is not essential to know.
What is
worth considering is that all an editor -- regardless of his or her level
of experience -- needs to see is the copy itself. Anyone able to think
critically should be able to see the conflicts and contradictions presented
in Cooke's story, Connolly said.
Consider what would have happened,
Connolly said, had things been done differently. Perhaps Cooke's piece
would have been held, for a day, while she "checked out" some of the discrepancies.
Perhaps she would have had trouble finding Jimmy, and would, therefore,
be unable to ensure her "facts" were right.
Perhaps she would have gotten another
assignment, effectively sending Jimmy's story to the back of a drawer,
where it would have gotten buried and forgotten.
Perhaps disaster could have
been averted.
Editors are there to
be skeptics. Acutely aware of, as Connolly said, things that "do not compute."
They must see the forest and the trees, watching that both the details
and the bigger picture make sense.
"They should think about how
critical it is that they be good at what they do and pay attention to it,"
Connolly said in an interview before the conference. "Copy editing
can save the world if it's done well enough."