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Course Material for Media & Politics Professor Susan E. Gallagher, UMASS Lowell Why Hasn't Robinson Been Fired?
Storin explained his failure to act by providing a bizarre take on affirmative action. He had, he admitted, been reluctant to go after Smith, who is black, because he had elected not to investigate similar discrepancies in the columns of another Globe columnist, Mike Barnicle, who is white: "I knew going way back that people said Barnicle made things up. . . . To the best of my knowledge, the paper had not addressed the Barnicle questions head on. I had this very talented black woman... How then can I take action against this woman under this circumstance?" In the short term, Storin overcame his concerns about his racial imbalance. Having asked for Smith's resignation, he chose to keep Barnicle on staff despite complaints about numerous inaccuracies in Barnicle's columns. Ultimately, however, after Barnicle's lies became too well documented to ignore, Storin was obliged to banish him from the paper. Robinson, some might argue, has kept his position because he never sunk to the sin that Barnicle had committed: plagiarism. In fact, John B. Roberts, a regular contributor to The Washington Spectator, wrote a column for The Washington Times in 2003 in which he accused Robinson and fellow Globe reporter Glen Johnson of copying substantial sections of his work. According to Roberts,
Roberts proceeded to provide specific examples of strikingly similar sentences that he said appeared first in his articles and then showed up later in the Globe. Although Roberts complained to Globe ombudsman Christine Chinlund, she countered that Robinson had never read Roberts' work and insisted that the information contained in Roberts' article had been "widely reported" in the media. As an example, Chinlund cited an article in the Washington Times, which, Roberts said, she was "surprised" to learn had credited Roberts as a source. The Thin Gray Line... Nobody, including Roberts, seems inclined to follow-up on this particular instance of shoddy reporting, which brings up another potential explanation for Robinson's longevity: his talent for getting other journalists to pay homage to his work. For example, in "The Road to the Ellis Story," which appeared, for some reason, on the Op-Ed page of the Globe, Jack Thomas elevated Robinson's assassination of Ellis into a masterwork of searching journalism: "Like the best stories in a newspaper," Thomas led into his laudation,
Having transformed an act of cruelty into a model of great reporting, Thomas gave Robinson an opportunity to disabuse readers of the notion that he is just plain mean: ""I couldn't write the story without looking the guy in the eye," says Robinson, "and so on Friday I drove two and a half hours to his home in Amherst."" However, after leaving Ellis on his doorstep stammering in shame, Robinson drove back to Boston prepared, apparently, to wreck the historian's life. But Robinson, ever human, didn't feel good. Instead, Thomas sighed, writing the piece left the dogged reporter "tired, empty and sad." Of course, if Robinson had, as Jack Beatty recommended, simply warned Ellis to stop lying to his students, or had suggested that Ellis come clean in the campus newspaper, a mountain of pain could have been avoided, and a great deal of space for significant news would have opened up in the Globe. Not surprisingly, the Spotlight Team's series on the sex abuse epidemic in the Catholic Church inspired even more expansive accolades. Many of the tributes, like that offered up by Bill Kirtz, wrongly reported that the Spotlight Team won a Pulitzer in 2003. Along these lines, Kirtz marveled, "The eighteen-month, 900-story effort by the paper’s Spotlight Team challenged and changed an institution. It also earned a raft of top journalism awards, including this year’s Pulitzer Prize for public service." In fact, despite its 900-story attempt, the Spotlight Team was not even named among the finalists for investigative reporting, and the Pulitzer went to the Globe as whole, mainly for unleashing a flood of previously sealed records of litigation against predatory priests. Since the rationale of the Pulitzer Jury is not made public, it's impossible to determine why the Spotlight Team's reporting on the Church went unrecognized, but the clergy sex abuse survivors and advocates who sent a letter of protest to the Pulitzer Board--a protest that focused both on the Team's egregious under-reporting on female victims, as well as its undermining of Edwards--like to speculate that their voices may have been heard. Unfortunately, this conclusion probably overestimates the sensitivity of the Pulitzer Board. However much journalists may depend on their subjects, most seem to care more about their image in the eyes of other journalists. As a result, no reporter would touch the Pulitzer protest, and many obliviously fed the misconception that victims uniformly regarded the Spotlight Team as their heroes, an illusion that Robinson and his compatriots did everything in their power to spread. This self-congratulatory compassion grew particularly thick when the Spotlight Team was hawking Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church, a tome, which, by the way, they somehow found time time to write even when they did not have time, according to ombudsman Chinlund, to write any stories on female victims. The Upshot
Late in 2003, National Public Radio aired
a major piece on Edwards, in which
Robinson lamely tried to justify his distortions by referring to
unspecified "doubts" about th Alas, it turned out that Globe editor Martin Baron was not about to darken his own resume by acknowledging his paper's massive distortions of what should have been one more numbingly familiar story of clergy sexual abuse. In response to the cascade of inaccuracies outlined in the Victim's Rights Committee Report, Baron insisted, without getting into specifics, "I've reviewed our coverage thoroughly, and I'm satisfied that it was fair." Although some readers might wish that Baron had been forced to offer more than this unsupported assertion, the Globe, in contrast to many other newspapers, has no discernible policies on fact-checking, sourcing, or corrections, and its only governing principle in regard to inaccuracy in reporting seems to be to congratulate itself for admitting violations of its journalistic standards whenever its missteps become too glaring to suppress. Fear not that Robinson will suffer if his tactics are ever noticed by mainstream journalists. Parks, Ellis, Flynn, and Gore will probably have to put up forever with the damage to their reputations, but Robinson can take comfort in the self-imposed standards of his profession, which rewarded Blair with primetime coverage of his memoir and secured sinecures for Barnicle at both the Daily News and the Boston Herald. Meanwhile, it's doubtful that we will hear a harsh word from the Boston Phoenix, which stayed carefully mum on Robinson's spectacular undoing of Edwards, a silence that suggests that staff writers there hope to follow the path of former Phoenix media critic Mark Jurkowitz, who loudly pledged never to work at the Globe right up until the paper offered him employment. Finally, as indicated by the Nieman Foundation's remarkable decision to award the Spotlight Team the Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Reporting in specific recognition of the Globe's handling of the Edwards case, Robinson's standing in his field is bound to remain undiminished no matter how many innocent people are injured by his obsessions. Tongues may cluck now and then over total fabrications, but the demolition of actual people doesn't seem to matter to most journalists. |
Upon
learning of Robinson's trail of distortion, many people wonder why he
remains a cause for celebration at the Globe. Part of the
explanation lies in the paper's long history of covering for dishonest
reporters until it becomes absolutely necessary to give them up.
Thus, when Globe columnist Patricia Smith was forced to resign in June
1998 after she admitted putting words into the mouths of
made-up people, former Globe editor Matthew Storin initially claimed
that 
e accuser's veracity. Since the NPR story made it clear that these
"doubts" were unfounded, and the Archdiocese had given up pretending
that Edwards lacks credibility, some of the victim's supporters imagined
that Edwards might rise from the dust to
which Robinson reduced him. Although Robinson had failed to
respond to yet another