From the It’s-Dangerous-To-Believe-Everything-You-Hear (or read) Department:
NEW BEDFORD — The UMass Dartmouth student who claimed to have been visited by Homeland Security agents over his request for “The Little Red Book” by Mao Zedong has admitted to making up the entire story.
The 22-year-old student tearfully admitted he made the story up to his history professor, Dr. Brian Glyn Williams, and his parents, after being confronted with the inconsistencies in his account.
Had the student stuck to his original story, it might never have been proved false.But on Thursday, when the student told his tale in the office of UMass Dartmouth professor Dr. Robert Pontbriand to Dr. Williams, Dr. Pontbriand, university spokesman John Hoey and The Standard-Times, the student added new details.
The agents had returned, the student said, just last night. The two agents, the student, his parents and the student’s uncle all signed confidentiality agreements, he claimed, to put an end to the matter.
But when Dr. Williams went to the student’s home yesterday and relayed that part of the story to his parents, it was the first time they had heard it. The story began to unravel, and the student, faced with the truth, broke down and cried.It was a dramatic turnaround from the day before.
This is The Standard-Times’ follow up, which is basically a retraction of a story…most assuredly given special attention by top editors before it went into the newspaper. To be more blunt, journalistically it’s a CYA story in the form of a news story (SEE BELOW):
For more than an hour on Thursday, he spoke of two visits from Homeland Security over his inter-library loan request for the 1965, Peking Press version of “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung,” which is the book’s official title.
His basic tale remained the same: The book was on a government watch list, and his loan request had triggered a visit from an agent who was seeking to “tame” reading of particular books. He said he saw a long list of such books.
In the days after its initial reporting on Dec. 17 in The Standard-Times, the story had become an international phenomenon on the Internet. Media outlets from around the world were requesting interviews with the students, and a number of reporters had been asking UMass Dartmouth students and professors for information.
The story’s release came at a perfect storm in the news cycle. Only a day before, The New York Times had reported that President Bush had allowed the National Security Agency to conduct wiretaps on international phone calls from the United States without a warrant. The Patriot Act, created in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to allow the government greater authority to monitor for possible terrorism activities, was up for re-authorization in Congress.
There was an increased sense among some Americans that the U.S. government was overstepping its bounds and trampling on civil liberties in order to thwart future attacks of terrorism. The story of a college student being questioned for requesting a 40-year old book on Communism fed right into that atmosphere.
There you have a retraction without it being called such. It talks about context and increased concern about Americans but leaves out the three words: “We were had.” AND:
In Thursday’s retelling of the story, the student added several new twists, ones that the professors and journalist had not heard before. The biggest new piece of information was an alleged second visit of Homeland Security agents the previous night, where two agents waited in his living room for two hours with his parents and brother while he drove back from a retreat in western Massachusetts. He said he, the agents, his parents and his uncle all signed confidentiality agreements that the story would never be told.
He revealed the agents’ names: one was Nicolai Brushaev or Broshaev, and the other was simply Agent Roberts. He said they were dressed in black suits with thin black ties, “just like the guys in Men in Black.”
Sounds like he saw that movie.
Just think of what the description would have been if he had seen How The Grinch Stole Christmas. MORE:
He had dates and times and places, things he had signed and sent back in order to receive the book. The tale involved his twin brother, who allegedly requested the book for him at UMass Amherst; his uncle, a former FBI attorney who took care of all the paperwork; and his parents, who signed those confidentiality agreements.
ETC. The story then goes into great detail how “the story had too many holes” and it was discovered that it was fake. Essentially, the student took his college, the newsmedia, and the Internet for a fun ride and now the newspaper — which had gotten so much attention from the original piece — is trying to rectify the original and gracefully extricate itself from a journalistic embarrassment. Some other tidbits:
While The Standard-Times had tape recorded the entire tale on Thursday, the reporter could not reach the student for comment after he admitted making up the story. Phone calls and a note on the door were not returned.
At the request of the two professors and the university, The Standard-Times has agreed to withhold his name….
“I grew skeptical of this story, as did Bob, considering the ramifications,” Dr. Williams said yesterday. “I spent the last five days avoiding work, and the international media, and rest, trying to get names and dates and facts. My investigation eventually took me to his house, where I began to investigate family matters. I eventually found out the whole thing had been invented, and I’m happy to report that it’s safe to borrow books.”
Dr. Williams said he does not regret bringing the story to light, but that now the issue can be put to rest.
“I wasn’t involved in some partisan struggle to embarrass the Bush administration, I just wanted the truth,” he said.
I was involved in a story akin to this but not quite on this scale. Years ago, in the early 1980s, I was a reporter on the Wichita Eagle. I was assigned this “hot story,” as an editor put it, about a woman who met the very same Vietnam Veteran whose name was on the POW wrist band she had worn for many years. A happenstance meeting. I interviewed the guy, the lady, had great quotes and wrote this wonderful readable, compelling feature. But I had wanted more time. I was told it couldn’t wait.
The editors I worked with wanted it in the paper ASAP because they genuinely felt we had enough and didn’t want television to get this great feature first. As soon as I wrote the story it was put out over the Knight-Ridder national news wire. And, when I saw the newspaper the next day, I almost died. I have excellent intuition and something wasn’t right about that story from the start. The photo in the paper showed her sitting in his lap. My intuitive red flags went off like crazy — so much that I felt nauseuous. And I was right.
I soon got calls from people saying his story was baloney, that he wasn’t overseas when he said he was. So we started checking out every single assertion. He claimed he worked on a special, secret mission for the military and we could not get confirmation or denial from Washington. But it seemed as if the government wanted to deny it, but couldn’t for policy reasons. In short, his story started to quickly unravel.
The story that ran the next day was similar to the story above. I did the raw draft and reporting but several editors worked on it. In the end, it read like a follow up feature addressing all of the outstanding issues but not stating what it really was…in effect, a retraction…because some things were not totally pinned down that should have been originally pinned down. And since it was a high-profile story (that one went over the KRN wire; the story above over all the wires and the Internet) all key points of the original plus how the original account was discovered to be full of holes had to be addressed in detail.
The moral of the story is: If someone comes to you and says “I have a story that’ll bust this town wide open!!!” beware.
UPDATE: The Boston Globe has a story about this story and notes that it had passed on this one:
The story, first reported in last Saturday’s New Bedford Standard-Times, was picked up by other news organizations, prompted diatribes on left-wing and right-wing blogs, and even turned up in an op-ed piece written by Senator Edward M. Kennedy in the Globe.
But yesterday, the student confessed that he had made it up after being confronted by the professor who had repeated the story to a Standard-Times reporter.
The professor, Brian Glyn Williams, said he went to his former student’s house and asked about inconsistencies in his story. The 22-year-old student admitted it was a hoax, Williams said.
”I made it up,” the professor recalled him saying. ”I’m sorry. . . . I’m so relieved that it’s over.”
The student was not identified in any reports. The Globe interviewed him Thursday but decided not to write a story about his assertion, because of doubts about its veracity. The student could not be reached yesterday.
Some Other Voices On This Story
–Glenn Reynolds, aka InstaPundit
—FBIHOP
—Narcissistic Views
—Rhymes With Right
—SpeakSpeak notes that it decided against running the original story.
—Spontaneous Arising
—Musing’s Musings has a long, meaty post.
—Dada Blog
—SarcastiPundit
—Interrupting Gelastic Jew
—The Politeburo Diktat
—Pun Salad
—Right Thinking From The Left Coast
—Savage Minds says this is its first-ever retraction.
—Walk In Brain
—Tom Tomorrow
—The Boston Progressive