The Boston Phoenix
June 25 - July 2, 1998

[Don't Quote Me]

Sifting the ashes

Making sense of Patricia Smith's startling self-immolation

Don't Quote Me by Dan Kennedy

The downfall of Boston Globe columnist Patricia Smith was ugly, emotional, and very, very public. From National Public Radio to local talk shows, from the front page of the New York Times (the Globe's corporate owner) to Howard Kurtz's widely read media column in the Washington Post, Smith's forced resignation was big news.

Given the circumstances, the Globe handled Smith's departure about as well as it could. Smith's fictions were discovered in-house, before some aggrieved outsider could drop a dime. The Globe itself has reported on the Smith affair vigorously and thoroughly. And editor Matt Storin dealt forthrightly with lingering questions about the paper's best-known columnist, Mike Barnicle.

But though the immediate crisis is over, the aftereffects of Smith's meltdown will be felt for some time to come.

As an African-American woman who was unafraid to speak truth to power, Smith was a vitally important presence in Boston, a city that continues to be haunted by race. By betraying her trust, she has given aid and comfort to her enemies, to those who just couldn't stand her outspoken championing of minorities, of lesbians and gay men, of the poor, and of ordinary working-class people.

Smith was not a great columnist. The quality of her work was wildly uneven, and it often appeared that her poetry and her heavy public-speaking schedule took priority over her newspaper career -- something she essentially acknowledged in her apologetic yet defiant farewell column. But when she was good, she was very good. Good enough to win a Distinguished Writing Award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors earlier this year. Good enough to be named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

The difference between a Smith column and the story of her downfall is that the latter can't be explained in a neat, narrative thread. What we're left with are a series of reflections and some unanswered questions.

  • Given Smith's past problems, why was she allowed such wide latitude? As we now know, Smith was confronted in 1995 after then-metro editor Walter Robinson suspected her of making up sources and quotes. And that may not have been Smith's first offense: in 1986 she was accused of blowing off at least part of a concert she had reviewed for the Chicago Sun-Times.

    Storin concedes that after the 1995 incident, he deliberately didn't ask Smith whether she had faked any of her columns. "If she said she had, she was gone," Storin told me this week. Thus was Smith read the riot act and given another chance, this time with clear ground rules. Yet rather than keep a close eye on Smith, the Globe allowed her the same wide latitude as the other metro columnists, Barnicle and 1997 Pulitzer-winner Eileen McNamara. True, Storin instituted a fact-checking system for all three in January 1996. But by having its metro columnists report to overextended senior editors (in Smith's case, to managing editor Greg Moore), the paper made it that much easier for falsehoods to slip through.

    "I would say that somebody who set out to do what Patricia did will get away with it for a while, no matter what your system is," says Storin. He's right. And there's no telling how long she would have gotten away with it if Robinson (again) had not done some checking and brought his concerns to Moore. But some Globe staffers grumble that Storin and other top editors should have known better -- that, in particular, they shouldn't have submitted Smith's work for a Pulitzer.

    "What was he doing, crossing his fingers and hoping no one would find out?" asks one disgusted staffer. "Everybody knew and nobody knew. They didn't want to know." In this case, ignorance carried a high price. So far, Smith has acknowledged falsehoods in four of her columns. That number could rise when the Globe completes its review of more than 200 of her columns.

  • The Barnicle front. Storin says that after he announced Smith's departure, virtually the first question he got from the staff was: what about Barnicle? Indeed, it's the first question a lot of people asked. Over his 25-year career, Barnicle has been accused of plagiarism, of concocting quotes, even of inventing characters. Then, too, the controversial Barnicle, like Smith, has made enemies both inside and outside the newsroom. Plenty of people would love to get Barnicle -- and Smith's resignation created the perfect opportunity.

    Storin ordered a review of Barnicle's columns going back to January 1996, when the new fact-checking system went into effect. By Saturday, he pronounced himself satisfied. But Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz has renewed his longstanding war with Barnicle, recycling eight-year-old charges that Barnicle had viciously misquoted him. Boston magazine, which charged Barnicle with fiction-writing in 1991, may be getting ready to make another run at him, too. Yet Barnicle's work has not been seriously questioned since Storin returned to the Globe, in 1992.

    Barnicle's Tuesday column spoke eloquently to the indignity he felt at having been held up to ridicule because of Smith's misdeeds. As the national media -- magazines, journalism reviews, and the like -- weigh in on the Smith affair in the weeks and months to come, Barnicle can expect to be scrutinized again.

  • Who will replace Smith? Storin says he wants to replace Smith with another minority journalist. He should. That voice is essential for establishing lines of communication with people the paper's mostly white readership doesn't often hear from.

    Understandably, Storin says he's barely begun to think about who might fill Smith's shoes, but there are some candidates. Derrick Jackson's op-ed column has its ups and downs, but he was terrific back when he was a metro columnist, in the 1980s. Boston Herald reporter Robin Washington, an award-winning documentary filmmaker with a black father and a Jewish mother, should have been made a columnist when Leonard Greene left One Herald Square. The Herald's mistake could be the Globe's opportunity.

    Certainly there's some healing that needs to be done. Smith has let down a lot of courageous African-American journalists who came before her. Is that a fair burden for her to have shouldered? No, but it was real. "There is some feeling that it just sets everybody back a number of steps," says United Way spokeswoman Carmen Fields, a Globe alumnus whose struggle for a more prominent role for blacks at the paper in the 1960s and '70s is documented in J. Anthony Lukas's 1985 book Common Ground.

  • How will Smith's transgressions affect the public's perception of the media? Last weekend two acquaintances brought up the Smith affair and casually asked, "Well, a lot of them do it, don't they?" I tried to explain that they don't, but in the current poisonous climate people don't want to hear it.

    Gross personal recklessness of the sort exhibited by Smith and another notorious faker, Stephen Glass, formerly of the New Republic, remains exceedingly rare. In the public's mind, though, such incidents are lumped in with the dubious CNN/Time story that claimed American forces tried to use nerve gas on deserters in Southeast Asia, Steven Brill's ethically questionable piece about the media's questionable ethics in the Monica Lewinsky affair, and the tabloid orgies sparked by stories such as the death of Princess Diana and the trial of Louise Woodward. Often, it seems, the public's cynicism can barely keep up with actual events.

  • What will become of Smith? Who knows? Maybe she'll write a novel, a screenplay, or even a memoir about the events of the past week. Storin thinks her newspaper career is over. But Smith's unethical behavior doesn't change my view of her as a gifted writer and as a warm, intelligent, funny person.

    Three years ago, we talked about her struggle to meld poetry and journalism. "The line between the two has been becoming increasingly blurred," she said. "I've always tried to take chances in my journalism. I've never really, outside of a short stint in Chicago, been a straight-news reporter. In fact, the short time I spent as a news reporter I felt caged. It just was not me.

    "I tend to struggle against categorization. A lot of my poetic work is inspired by things I've encountered in my work as a journalist. If I'm doing journalism, I'm tied in to doing something that's factually based. If I'm doing poetry, I can create a world. So on the one hand it's a perfect escape from having to deal with facts all the time."

  • Patricia Smith has made her escape. Now it's up to her to see what she can do with her unsought, and unwelcome, freedom.


    Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy


    Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com


    Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here


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