Sifting the ashes
Making sense of Patricia Smith's startling self-immolation
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.
Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here
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