Dear Readers:
A story in the St. Pete Times reported that the Associated Press has “fired a reporter after learning that more than three dozen of his stories contained quotations from experts whose existence could not be verified.” The reporter, Christopher Newton, had worked for the wire service for almost eight years in Texas, Pennsylvania, and D.C.
“The AP found 40 stories that contained quotations from individuals who cannot be located. Most were identified by Newton as having academic or public policy credentials.”
The St. Pete Times story listed names such as Jocelyn Winters, Hugh Brownstone, Patrick Delraj, Irma Gonzales, and Janice Paine as sources that could not be identified. (Let it be at least noted that if this was fakery, the writer had a sense of gender and ethnic diversity in fabricating sources.)
This scandal demonstrates that the Associated Press should be shut down and that any reporter writing in the AP style should be fired. Extreme measures, you say? Dr. Ink says no more extreme than the fulminations that follow a typical literary scandal that involves a journalist writing in the narrative style. On such occasions, the reactionaries wave the bloody shirt of fabrication, denounce the use of narrative, and dismiss as un-prize-worthy any story not littered with attribution.
Well, now we are reminded that writers who labor in the vineyards of conventional news-telling can make stuff up too, and that attribution can be used, not only to verify, but to falsify.
