Gypped

The Daily Egyptian, the student newspaper at Southern Illinois University, appears to have quite a problem on their hands. A journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin was kind enough to pass this AP article from The New York Times on to me. The piece details an elaborate hoax, in which the paper apparently enrolled a bizarre combination of actors, fiction and a hybrid of yellow journalism to tell the story of an 8-year-old girl whose father has been deployed to Iraq.

Memories of Jayson Blaire come immediately to mind. The story being told by the student paper was so touching, so heart-wrenching and so perfect that it, of course, was too good to be true. The paper’s former editor in chief and a 2004 graduate of SIU are pointing fingers at each other. The faculty advisor is rightfully embarrassed. And numerous readers have been duped.

Sure, an apology/retraction was run. But it would appear that without some prodding by an upstate newspaper, the truth may never have surfaced. And one has to wonder, just how much of what we read can truly be trusted.

It is one thing to see gonzo-style pieces in the grand tradition of Hunter S. Thompson and know that a relative amount of an article is pure fiction – though not stated up front, such is always the expectation. But when hard news stories – tales about the Iraq war devastating a family – are rooted in a reality no firmer than a writer’s sick imagination, journalism truly gets a bad name.

The New York Times survived Jayson Blaire. Much as I may beat up on the paper for that scandal, and for its wantonly liberal slant, I still read it regularly and use it for the majority of links in this blog. But The New York times has a lot more going for it than The Daily Egyptian.