HERE’s yet ANOTHER scandal involving allegedly made-up sources — this time at the Sacramento Bee and it’s enough to give a journalist hives:
A newspaper investigation of a former columnist for The Sacramento Bee could not verify 43 sources she used in a sampling of 12 years of her work.
Diana Griego Erwin resigned May 11 as she came under scrutiny about the existence of people she quoted. She has denied making up information, but Executive Editor Rick Rodriguez said the Bee should have been able to locate the people named in the stories.
“It kills us that we can’t,” said Rodriguez, whose comments were included in a story about the investigation published in Sunday’s Bee. “We still hope they will turn up, but we’re presenting the facts as we found them. Obviously, we feel strongly that we should have been able to find these individuals.”
Griego Erwin, who has said her resignation was for personal reasons, joined the Bee after a distinguished career at other newspapers. She worked on a project that won a Pulitzer Prize at the Denver Post in 1986 and also won a George Polk award and the 1990 commentary prize from the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
The discrepancies in Griego Erwin’s work were discovered after the Bee tightened its anonymous sources policy and questioned whether columnists were given too much latitude.
Several things seem to be happening. Standards are being tightened so more of these cases are coming to the forefront and getting publicity. Tighter standards mean greater scrutiny — more vetting (even after the fact). Newspaper credibility is an issue, so publishers (not just editors) want to clamp down to avoid messy scandals (like this).
So it’s getting tougher and tougher out there. Just think: if you WERE a reporter or columnst who liked to cut corners on attribution (either actually talking to someone or keeping a record of it) where could you go? Where could you go where there was no one to interfere with you writing whatever you wanted even if you attributed quotes to someone even an IRS auditor could never find.
There’s nowhere…wait…there is! DO A BLOG!
FOOTNOTE: We will be posting our excuslive interview with Jimmy Hoffa next week.
ANOTHER VIEW: Uncorrelated.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.