Sanchez: A tale of 2 journalists provide good lessons for all

By Mary Sanchez

Are journalistic standards holding up under the stresses the profession is facing? Two recent events offer an opportunity for reflection.

Jayson Blair, the plagiarizing, fabricate-as-you-go former New York Times reporter, was invited to speak with journalism students at Washington and Lee University on, of all things, ethics. Blair made for a somber lecturer, banished as he is from the profession. To a crowd eager for the opportunities he once had, Blair spoke about how he squandered them.

In other news, firebrand Lou Dobbs resigned from CNN, to the delight of his many critics.

For decades, the sober, conservative face of CNN, in recent years Dobbs has led a personal crusade against illegal immigration that has taken him down a path toward conspiracy mongering and just plain bad journalism.

From his perch at “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” he frequently turned over the CNN platform to extremist voices, presenting them as expert commentators. As a result, a coalition of civil rights groups dismayed at his often racially inflammatory rhetoric against immigrants, particularly Latinos, pressured CNN to call Dobbs to heel.

From one point of view, it would be unfair to compare Blair's gross journalistic misconduct with the peccadilloes Dobbs has committed in pursuit of his obsession.

Blair, you may recall, often did not bother even to go to the cities where he claimed to have conducted face-to-face interviews, including those of injured soldiers returned from Iraq and their anguished families. He preferred to help himself to the work of other reporters, stealing their quotes and descriptions, or simply to concoct story details himself.

Dobbs has neither plagiarized nor fabricated stories from thin air. Yet he has consistently stretched and twisted tidbits of truth into grand conspiracy narratives that have little resemblance to reality.

In a typical diatribe, Dobbs claimed that one-third of the nation's prison inmates are illegal immigrants. (In fact, less than 7 percent of inmates are non-citizens, whether here illegally or not.)

Dobbs later retracted the claim. Factoids of this nature are Dobbs' stock-in-trade. Sometimes they're exaggerations. Sometimes it's hard to believe they're anything but flat-out lies.

But what they add up to is misinformation - exactly what journalism should not be.

One of the many fine things about print journalism - or reputable print journalism, anyway - is that there is a system of peer review in place, starting with your newspaper's copy desk and ending with readers (including watchdog groups and journalists at other papers and magazines) who can call you to account if you are not accurate.

Obviously, it doesn't always work swiftly or smoothly. Nearly a year before Blair resigned, a metro editor sent a memo up the Times chain of command warning, “stop Jayson from writing for the Times.”

In his remarks to the students, Blair admitted, “Somewhere along the way, on my way of climbing upwards, I lost sight of the very reason I entered journalism.” In a way, that's a fitting coda to a scandal that shook the nation's premier newspaper to its very foundations. Journalism is nothing without its ethics. And those ethics endure.

We'll likely have to wait a long time for such a mea culpa from Dobbs.

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msanchez@kcstar.com