Dog-Bites-Dog

By Laurence I. Barrett

Most journalists occasionally encounter what might be called the Insider's Lament. Anywhere non-newsies can corner them, someone carps along this line: "Dammit, on subjects I'm personally involved in, you guys often get it wrong." The critic usually adds that if he had been consulted, all would have been right. How a journalist responds to this generic complaint depends partly on his tact and hubris quotients. Insiders with their own strong views, after all, tend to cavil about competing ideas and stories they consider less than comprehensive. But when I run into the I.L. these days, I find myself saying, "I know what you mean."

Explaining this sympathy requires one of those shoe-on-the-other-foot tales. Perhaps dog-bites-dog is a better label. Like many Washington-based agents for large news organizations, I am mentioned in other publications now and then. Our work is parsed by press critics; we get into contretemps with the powerful; we serve as filler for the growing number of gossip columns. All this is, in principle, legitimate. Those who groan reflexively when needled or critiqued simply confirm the aphorism about journalistic skins being thinner than the average American adult's. What stokes my personal I.L. is the frequency of error in these items. The venerable practice of checking ostensible facts with the story's subject seems to be declining.

Granted, these worrisome conclusions rest on totally unscientific research. A few recent mentions prompted an inspection of my ego folder of clippings going back several years. Some of the contents were unsettling. Having no reason to believe that I was being singled out for special hazing, I decided that purveyors of the I.L. have a larger point than the news business should tolerate.

The Washington Times, for instance, recycled a story from MediaWatch, a right-wing newsletter. MediaWatch's conviction is that the national press corps is a left-wing cabal bent on discrediting conservatives. In that spirit, it took TIME (and me) to task for coverage of a controversy involving Republican National Committee chairman Lee Atwater. MediaWatch is of course entitled to its ideology. But in parroting the MediaWatch article as fact -- including the erroneous assertion that no TIME reporter had sought Atwater's side of the story -- the Washington Times neglected to check with the target of the criticism. The paper dutifully ran a correction.

Political bias is only one element of the unchecked-error syndrome. Another could be labeled the pseudoauthoritative dodge. Washingtonian, a prosperous, glossy monthly, does an annual salary survey. This fall's version, listing hundreds of names linked to specific monetary figures, appears to be based on serious research. Eight TIME staffers were cited. Mystified, several of us agreed that the figures were wrong (by 30% in one case) and that none of us had been consulted by Washingtonian. The writer, Robert Pack, explained, "You don't call hundreds of people and ask them what they make because they won't tell you." Pack insisted that he had knowledgeable sources for his numbers. A ^ Washingtonian editor, however, acknowledged that such stories are "ball-park estimates."

Then there is the boner buried in commentary. A classic example of that appeared in a Washington Monthly review of a book of mine back in 1983. The critic mentioned that I ate breakfast with Ronald Reagan at the White House and "spent weekends with the President at Camp David." Neither assertion was true (not one cornflake with Reagan, not one hoofbeat at Camp David). These and similar inaccuracies supported the punch line that excess access might have warped my perspective. The reviewer later explained that he'd lacked the time to check the information.

In fact, the Monthly often scolds the rest of journalism about unsound practices, with access being a particular bugaboo. It dutifully acknowledged the errors two months later -- after others had repeated them. Editor Charles Peters now says his writers usually do check with people they criticize. "The time you don't do it," he adds, "is when everyone knows what the other guy would say. Even then, it should be done."

That exploratory phone call, of course, is no guarantee of accuracy. New York magazine inquired whether I had reviewed a manuscript for possible serialization in TIME. Yes, I had; no, we wouldn't. But the item relating this routine transaction attributed a direct quote to me ostensibly delivered to "colleagues." The remark, never uttered, was not checked either with me or with the editor to whom I had reported. Later, the New York Times Book Review picked up the unfounded quote. The news section of the same Sunday edition carried an editors' note pointing out that the original gossip-page item in New York had been denied.

For the sake of balance, I must report that many clips in my ego folder are unexceptionable. National Review, for instance, recently hollered indignantly about the tilt of something I'd written. Fair enough; my prose was quoted accurately. Still other stories are both factually correct and somewhere between benign and laudatory. (These will be suitably framed and hung on my office wall as soon as time permits.) But there are enough unalloyed clinkers in this little collection to raise disturbing questions. If Washingtonian didn't get my pay right, how many other numbers in that story were wrong? If the New York Times -- ostensibly the newspaper of record -- adopts a dubious item from a gossip column, how many other colorful anecdotes are published without being checked for accuracy?

More broadly, if too many news organizations neglect to check their facts, how long before the Insider's Lament becomes everyone's? In a business whose cardinal asset is credibility, that notion should be unsettling.