Course Material for Media & Politics

Professor Susan E. Gallagher, UMASS Lowell

Page Three: Just Ask the Experts...

A somewhat similar technique that Robinson has developed involves obtaining damaging commentary from people who seem to possess relevant knowledge and then fudging crucial details about these commentators in order to beef up their credibility.  For example, in 2000, in an exposé of apparent exaggerations in civil rights leader Paul Parks's claims about his military service during World War II, Robinson sought commentary from veterans who were in a position to discredit Parks's assertions because they had been on the scene.  Here are a few passages from two separate stories that Robinson wrote on Parks:

(1) To Army historians, and especially men who were at Dachau, Parks's conflicting accounts only reinforce their views that he was not there. Hugh Foster, the retired Army lieutenant colonel who alerted B'nai B'rith to the inconsistencies of Parks's military record, said Parks's claims are so outrageous he wonders where else it could lead.

(2) Felix L. Sparks, who as a 27-year-old lieutenant colonel led the liberation of the main camp at Dachau, said flatly that Parks was not there when the camp fell to American forces in April 1945....

Veterans, including Sparks, Foster, and Cranston Rogers, a 75-year-old veteran from Medway, who were among the liberators of Dachau, said they have followed for years newspaper stories about Parks's military service.

From passages such as these, readers might logically surmise that "Hugh Foster, the retired Army lieutenant colonel" had himself been at Dachau, or had at least served during World War II, when in fact  Hugh Foster was born in 1947, a bit of information that Robinson chose to omit even while including the ages of the other veterans who had discredited Parks. 

Robinson's campaign against Edwards, an even more defenseless target, relied on similarly strategic omissions to create specific misimpressions without explicitly misstating particular facts.  For example, in order to illustrate that Edwards suffered from a "penchant for fanciful invention" that led him to fabricate "critical details about his career and health," Robinson and other Globe reporters repeatedly alleged that Edwards had pretended that he had been given a part in the movie Jaws:

8/22/02 When Paul Edwards was growing up in Newton, his friends recall, he returned home from his 1974 summer vacation on Martha's Vineyard to tell them that he had been cast that summer as one of the shark's victims in the filming of ''Jaws.'' The hit film opened a year later - without Edwards.

8/23/02 The Edwards acquaintances also portrayed him as a person prone to fanciful embellishments of his personal story, including false claims that he was deaf, that an uncle of his had died, that he had a role in the movie ''Jaws.''

8/30/02 The Globe report also raised other questions about Edwards's credibility. According to school classmates, he had a habit of making up stories about himself. For instance, he told friends in school in 1974 that he had a role in the 1975 hit movie, ''Jaws.''

9/4/02 Meanwhile, acquaintances of Edwards portrayed him as a person with a long history of embellishments, including false claims that he was deaf, that he was encouraged to play semipro hockey by two pro hockey stars, and that he had a role in the movie ''Jaws.'' [Story written by Sacha Pfeiffer and Michael Rezendes.]

9/15/02 ...the Globe reported that childhood friends of Edwards had evidence to refute the charges, and they raised instances in which they said Edwards had made other false claims, including an assertion that he had played a role in the 1975 hit movie ''Jaws.''

In their many reiterations of this second-hand tale of Edwards' boasts of stardom, which had, by the way, been supplied by the supporters of the priests whom Edwards had accused, Robinson and his colleagues chose to exclude the context, which was that Edwards was seven years old when he arrived home from Martha's Vineyard and, having spent time on beaches where the movie was shot among crowds of vacationers who were used as extras, understandably imagined that he would appear in the film. Of course, since including Edwards' age would have exposed the story as an obviously silly attack on Edwards' credibility, Robinson and his underlings deliberately left it out.

While most people would probably feel that the Globe's repetition of such an irrelevant and incomplete story should not have been transformed into ammunition against an adult victim of childhood sexual abuse, Robinson's tactics were defended by other journalists such as former New York Times media reporter Felicity Barringer.  Barringer excused the Globe's angle on Edwards by pointing out that Robinson had at least initially indicated that Edwards was "growing up" when he allegedly pretended that he would appear in Jaws.  Thus, like Robinson, who asserted in a meeting with victims' advocates in January 2003 that readers "could do the math" to determine Edwards' age when Jaws came out, Barringer seems to have concluded, not only that hostile hearsay is appropriate source material for reports on clergy sex abuse victims, but also that journalists can expect the public to take the time to perform their own calculations when basic details such as a person's age are sidestepped in heavily damaging media accounts.

Calling the Kettle...

Yet another strategy Robinson uses to bamboozle readers is first to let loose a cascade of undocumented assertions, then, after he is confronted with contrary evidence, to maintain that even if he wrongly reported certain details, he should not be forced to issue corrections because his overall point remains unshaken.  This was the tactic to which Robinson turned after being taken to task for his tedious misreporting on Al Gore's "storied tendency to embellish facts."  Taking a page from the Bush campaign's efforts during the 2000 presidential election to portray its Democratic opponent as a liar, Robinson recited a list of the former vice-president's admittedly self-serving comments on his personal history—modesty is not, after all, typical of people who are running for office—and repeated the groundless allegation that Gore had pretended that he had "invented the Internet," which, by that time, anyone who was following the story knew that Gore had never said.

Then, in a move that betrayed the same inclination to embroider that he was trying to pin on Gore, Robinson and his co-author, Michael Crowley, alleged that, "starting in 1994, Gore has added two years to his journalistic experience, upping the figure from the five years he once claimed to seven."  In fact, as Bob Somerby observed in his Daily Howler, a web site on media misreporting, Gore did work for seven years as a journalist, spending two years working as a reporter while serving in the Army and five years working at The Tennessean.  In December 2001, when Rolling Stone reporter Eric Boehlert asked Robinson why he had promoted this distortion, Robinson defended his original allegation by pointing out that Gore's stint in the army lasted less than two years and also that Gore had worked part-time at the Tennessean during two of his five years at the paper. Even though these qualifications fail to explain why Robinson and Crowley had alleged that Gore had tacked two years onto his journalistic career, Robinson was undeterred by his own misreporting.  "It was," he insisted, "another example of Gore sort of rounding things up to his advantage, trying to make it into something bigger."

How Many Beers?

One of Robinson's especially aggravating tactics is his habit of focusing on contradictory trivialities that are so insignificant that they would not merit the slightest attention were they not being used to tear his targets to shreds.  In the course of FLYNN AT THE VATICAN: HIS MAYORAL STYLE DIDN'T CUT IT, a piece which included back-stabbing expressions of concern about the former mayor's drinking, offered up, predictably, by "friends,"  Robinson wrote:

Wary of questions about his drinking, Flynn took issue last week with a March 2 Globe article that described him as a regular at one of Rome's Irish pubs, the Dog and Duck. In four years, he asserted, he had been in the pub just three times. And he denied ever going to that, or to any other pub, with American seminarians.

On both those points, several Catholic priests whom Flynn counts as friends contradicted him, as did the owner, bartenders and other regulars at the Dog and Duck who got to know Flynn so well they fondly call him a "vero," or "true" man. Maurizio Impeciati, the owner of the pub -- one of at least three in Rome that Flynn frequented -- said the ambassador drank at his establishment about two nights a week. He and the bartenders said Flynn would usually have two or three pints of Guinness. He never saw Flynn have more than two beers.

The Rev. John McGuire, a Dominican priest who counts Flynn as a close friend from McGuire's years at North American College, said he was aware of Flynn's penchant for visiting pubs with the college's seminarians -- something Flynn denied ever having done.

Here it's not clear if the point at issue is how much Flynn drank or where he drank or who he drank with, but it is worth noting that none of this innuendo comes even close to showing that Flynn's drinking interfered with his job performance, which is the only conceivable justification for printing this story, even if it still fails to explain why it ran on the front page of the Globe.  Not only are the two consecutive references to the number of drinks Flynn consumed inconsistent, it is also perfectly possible that Flynn earned the moniker "vero" in less than half an hour at the Dog & Duck, that Rev. John McGuire, "who counts Flynn as his close friend," may have some axe to grind, and that Flynn has never gone to a pub in Rome with an American seminarian. What is clear is that the accuracy of these petty details does not matter in the least since these passages have no purpose other than to blacken Flynn's reputation, and for that Robinson needed only a string of unverifiable iterations of the idea that Flynn drank too much.

Padding the Accounts

Robinson's annihilation of historian Joseph Ellis likewise transformed what most people would regard as a serious personal problem into national news.  Having heard that Ellis was lying to his classes at Mount Holyoke about having served in Vietnam, Robinson blew what should have been a splash in the campus newspaper into an occasion for nationwide pontification on the problem of self-distortion.  And how did one man's fabricated war stories get to be fodder for so much hand wringing?  Robinson had access to his usual forum for his breathless revelations about other people's prevarications: the front page of the Globe.  Just as Robinson dug deep to uncover how many beers Flynn drank in Rome, his intrepid penetration into Ellis's background led him to discover, not only that Ellis had lied to his students about his military exploits, but also that the prize-winning historian had falsely claimed to have scored a touchdown on his high school football team.

Since it is hard to understand why these autobiographical distortions demanded such extensive coverage, it is not surprising that Robinson embellished the story with misleading assertions about Ellis's past.  Describing a C-Span interview in which Ellis summarized his academic history, Robinson wrote:

Asked about his background, Ellis said on the program: ''Undergraduate, College of William & Mary, entered the Army after that, eventually went to graduate school at Yale. Then, after that, still owed the Army and spent three years teaching on the faculty at West Point.'' In fact, he had no Army service between William & Mary and Yale.

However, in a letter to the Globe, "DESPITE FABRICATIONS, ELLIS DID SERVE AS OFFICER DURING VIETNAM," historian and West Point Faculty member Frank D. McCain corrected Robinson's assertions, pointing out that Ellis was a commissioned officer in the Army Reserve when he taught at West Point, and also observing that Ellis had not, as Robinson claimed, "arranged the West Point teaching assignment," but had been selected by the Army to teach there.  While Robinson might repeat his defense of his earlier stories by arguing that these were minor mistakes in a substantially accurate account, it would be, to say the least, ironic if he were to minimize his own 'tendency to embellish' while maximizing instances of the same proclivity in the people he was aiming to pop.

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