Mitch Albom's Unethical Column
I spend a fair amount of time in the pack of NBA reporters. They are, by and large, surly, humorless, rote, bitter, jealous, cranky, and joyless.
A few of them, however, are supernovas. Once in a while, one will make it big in some way or another, transcend the pack, and bring sunshine to the pressroom.
One of the best examples of such a writer is the talented and touching Mitch Albom of the Detroit Free Press. After writing the best-selling Tuesdays with Morrie and The Five People You Meet in Heaven he must have made about as much money as a writer can make. But he's still in the pack covering the NBA, still writing about it for the Free Press, and still about the best in the business. So you have to salute him for that.
But he recently did a big bad thing. He wrote this column which was essentially a pack of lies. He wrote about stuff that was supposed to happen, but hadn't yet.
He interviewed former college teammates, and current NBA players, Mateen Cleaves and Jason Richardson and wrote, on Friday, about how they were going to get together to watch their alma mater on Saturday. Only, his column was coming out on Sunday, so he wrote in the past tense about how they had already watched the game together. He mentions what they wore, how they got there, a whole bunch of stuff.
Then it never happened. They reportedly had scheduling conflicts and didn't go to the game. But the column came out all the same.
Now there are investigations and apologies galore.
Of course, shame on Albom and the Free Press both for letting this happen. There should be two safeguards against this: no one should ever make crap up and stick it in a news story, and aggressive editors should go to great lengths to make sure they never publish fabrications.
After the initial errors, however, I salute the Free Press for its very public handling of this. Most papers would have taken his offending column off their website, for instance, but instead they attached a plain English explanation of his mistake over the column. The publisher and editor apologized. Albom apologized (His one fault here: he said he considered the parts he got wrong to be "details." That's misleading. They may have been tangential to his main point, but they are still the core facts of his story.). The public editor got on the case.
Some people are upset that such a fuss is being made about this. Not me. I support the public airing of Mitch Albom's dirty laundry. He's great. But he screwed up this time. Harmless as the column was--its underlying point was to enjoy yourself while you're young--it was on a slippery slope heading straight to having make-believe crap in our newspapers. No, no, no, we can't have that.
posted by henryabbott @ Tuesday, April 12, 2005
12 Comments
12 Comments:
Albom pretty much guaranteed that they wouldn't show up by pulling such a boneheaded move. Mike Barnicle was fired for this sort of crap: lets see if Albom's "ABC Family Movie" cachet from his night job writing inspirational pablum insulates him from the appropriate consequences. if you claim the right to lecture peole on living well and living ethically, you should put the (metaphorical) gun to your own temple when you pull a stunt like this. Preach morals and you always get caught: cf O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Bennett, et al.
Preach morals and you always get caught--that is, if you are a phony.
But if you're legit and do a bad thing, does that make you full of it forever? (What if the Dalai Lama filed incorrect taxes. Does that invalidate the thousands of preachy messages in all of his books?)
I don't know if Albom is legit. or not, but if there's some mechanism in place to keep him from being unethical, which there should always be, then I certainly think he should be writing about the NBA, because he's one of the best.
The Dalai Lama is a bad example with me; he loves a good dictator (just not Chinese ones who keep him off his throne). Spare me the Dalai Lama and his Oprahesque bleatings a la Stuart Smalley.
Albom should be allowed to keep writing as long as he hasn't ever written a column for money about the sins of athletes or other writers, and even then not for a NEWSpaper. Readers Digest, maybe.
Oh sorry- by his own standards (Lama boy, that is), yes it does.
Also:
"But if you're legit and do a bad thing, does that make you full of it forever?"
No, but you do have to pay for your transgression. If you are a clerk in a store for 20 years and only once dip into the register, you are still liable for that action, regardless of past behavior.
OK, if the Dalai Lama's going to take us on a tangent, let me try a different example. I'll assume we agree there are some bad things about the Bible. Caused wars, full of inaccuracies, possibly written to deliver political clout to certain people back in the day...
But does that mean "thou shalt not steal" is somehow not good advice?
Of course it is. I choose to take the good and leave the bad. The Bible is good on the topic of theft and bad on how to handle Arabs and Jews. The guys at Jiffy Lube are great at oil changes but terrible at replacing your transmission. Mitch Albom is good on drawing inspiration from sports and bad on muckraking.
There's a place for that. It's a matter of being a savvy consumer. And the Free Press has given us the information we need to be savvy consumers, with big massive notices all over the website and newspaper that clearly spell out his precise transgressions.
I'm not moved by Albom being a nice guy or not (I've never read any of his stuff, I only caught a passing glimpse of Hank Azaria making a prize tit of himself in a movie adaptation) or whether he is a good writer, or whether or not he claims the moral highground, or whether he and his editor have mea culpea'd up and down the court; the fact remains he MADE SHIT UP while working as a journalist. Mike Barnicle, Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass etc were all fired, and rightly so. In fact, the more luminous your name the more rapidly you should be dumped for breaching ethics. After all, I'm sure Michael Milliken was an excellent broker aside from that illegal junk bond shit, and that undertaker in Georgia who didn't bother to cremate people's remains was a real nice guy to chat with and active in his church.
As you quote: "thou shalt not steal". Not "thou shalt steal once, get a warning if you apologise even though you knew from the start it was wrong and lazy, and be treated differently from others because you are famous and affable."
I think we all agree on the principle that he screwed up big time. That was the point of my original post. It's only a question of what the effective punishment is.
Where would you draw the line? Surely he should not be killed for this. What about beaten or jailed?
I'm curious as to why you assume firing is the only proper recourse.
I also think it's worth remembering that he has been punished to some degree already. Undertakers and junk bond traders have relationships with their clients that are based on dead bodies and financial transactions, respectively (one would hope). When they screw up, their punishments should affect their ability to do those things.
Writers have relationships based on words on a page. The reaction that future readers are likely to have to what he puts on paper is all that Albom has to sell. So being trashed in his own paper is actually quite stern punishment. (Like being outed as lip-synchers was massive punishment for Milli Vanilli.) This incident will probably affect the numbers in his next book deal, and how often Sports Illustrated asks him to do high profile articles. It has also already put him on unofficial probabtion, whereby if he is found to have done other things like this then he really will be in a career crisis much like historian Stephen Ambrose experienced near the end of his life.
Also, in the case of Milken or the undertaker, you have to shut them down because the people they are out to screw (families of the deceased, investors) can never really know if they are repeating the offense or not. But in this case, everything is so public. The people who were betrayed--the reading public--are in a position to see to it that they are not betrayed again. Bloggers will tear him down like Rather if he does it again. So I'm not calling for his head.
The best punishment I can think of, on top of what has already and rightly been done, would be inspired by something that happened when I was at NYU.
A film student was using one of the school's 16mm film cameras--these are big heavy metal things from a bygone era--on the tenth floor balcony overlooking the library atrium. He somehow knocked it, and it fell over the edge and shattered on the strangely patterned modern marble atrium floor 100 feet below.
There are always tons of people down there, and it really is lucky he didn't kill someone. But they didn't throw the book at the guy (nor the busted pieces of the camera). The main punishment he got was that he had to teach camera safety to every film student for the rest of his
three and a half years at NYU. By the time he graduated, everyone knew him as the guy who taught camera safety.
It may not have been as fun as banishing him from the prized film department for life, but I guarantee it was more effective and made the world a better place.
So maybe I'll be the first to sign up for Mitch Albom's free class on journalism ethics.
Knocking a camera out of a window is an accident. Making stuff up, even to add color to a column, is premeditated.
The bottom line is he is a journalist. If he were a simply a writer, his relationship would be limited to words. As a journalist, his relationship is with truth.
He can be as ethical as the day is long at all other times, but he still broke the ethical rules.
I doubt it will effect his reputation anyway: Doris Kearns Goodwin (plagarism) still publishes best sellers and is a pundit on PBS, while Ambrose's books still fly off the shelves and the national D-Day museum in New Orleans has a wing named after him. Prosperity won't punish Albom (and he knows it) so ultimately its down to his newspaper's public editor or ombudsman.
Don't have to fire him, but he should be at the very least suspended.
My basic point is there can be no moral relativism; the punishment should be fitting to a first offence but the fact that he is normally a good egg has no bearing on the fact that he still broke ethical rules (and can we be sure this was the only time?).
-The ombudsman is all over him, and so is the publisher. Very publicly and very quickly.
-He is already suspended.
-There is an investigation underway--and as the facts of this case are not under dispute, I can only assume that panel is looking for past transgressions to address your every concern.
In short, the Free Press is filling the precise prescription you wrote.
Hooray! Doesn't mean I can't have a good moan though, does it?
That's what we're here for.
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