Columbia Journalism Review to Salon and Max Blumenthal: You Can't Just Make Stuff Up

Greg Marx at the Columbia Journalism Review has come out with his report on the James O’Keefe/Max Blumenthal/Salon dust-up last week, and the results are not pretty:

UNFORCED ERROR AT SALON

“O’Keefe’s race problem” story goes astray on key detail

… At issue here is a more specific point: Blumenthal’s claim in the original story that, “Together, O’Keefe and [fellow conservative activist Marcus] Epstein planned an event in August 2006 that would wed their extreme views on race with their ambitions.” That was the line that most directly tied O’Keefe to Epstein, whose record includes a subsequent arrest for assaulting an African-American woman, and that most directly gave him ownership of the event.

The problem is that, as it appeared in the Salon story, the source for the claim was unclear. And, as became apparent over the next couple days, Blumenthal’s sources–including Daryle Jenkins, director of a racism watchdog group called the One People’s Project, which monitored the event, and a pseudonymous freelance photographer known as Isis–did not actually know whether O’Keefe had planned the gathering.

But as a journalist, it’s incumbent upon Blumenthal–and any outlet that publishes his work–to distinguish between what his sources actually observed and what they believe to be true. A journalist’s claim to an audience’s trust is based on the implicit promise that he will take that step. And that responsibility, obviously, doesn’t go away just because you’ve got a good story or a worthy target.

And, in this case, Blumenthal did have a real story on his hands…

… an error of this sort does more than provide O’Keefe with a defense, by allowing him to shift the focus to a point that was not proven. It also, for every minute that it’s out there, provides ready-made ammunition for that broader campaign–and for the idea that the media is motivated by ideological biases and personal vendettas, unconstrained by norms that ensure fairness and accuracy.

This is the bigger stakes here: the press’s ability to make a claim for the public’s trust. Part of the way to do that is to make the case, aggressively, for good journalism. But an equally important step is for the press to live up to its own high standards, to demonstrate what good journalism demands. By eventually issuing a correction and owning up to a mistake, Salon and Blumenthal did that in the end. Next time, hopefully, it’ll happen from the outset.

Please read the whole thing.

Several publications, including The Village Voice, actually did issue corrections and retractions. You can see Salon’s correction note here, but — among other unanswered issues — the original story still contains the photoshopped picture of O’Keefe in a white jacket, and refers to his being in attendance at a “white-nationalist confab,” which, as Big Journalism’s Larry O’Connor pointed out here, is not true.