A group of student journalists made a terrible mistake recently, violating newspaper ethics by accurately quoting a source. (A named source, no less.) Fortunately, however, the professionals at the Los Angeles Times quickly spotted the error and rode in to correct it.
The real-life lesson in newspapering began on 29 January, when a student at UCLA called the campus newspaper to tell an intriguing story. Poli-sci major Dennis Lytton told a Daily Bruin reporter that he had, as a Pentagon intern, dated a young woman named Monica Lewinsky. Following what sounds like a really awful date - Phantom of the Opera, that sort of thing - they went back to Monica's apartment. Here comes the romantic moment: Dennis stares into Monica's eyes. Monica's moist, full lips part seductively. And she tells him, purportedly with some pride, that she and Bill Clinton are "fuck buddies," adding, "You could say I earned my presidential kneepads." Now, how about a kiss?
The Bruin - which, to its great credit, had almost entirely ignored the Lewinsky scandal - spent several days carefully checking as much of the story as possible. They also took a close look at Lytton, calling friends and family and asking if they considered him reliable. They did, and the campus paper finally decided to go with the story - simply, soberly, accurately. A few days later, the other shoe dropped. The Times' what-kind-of-ethics-is-this story, condescendingly headlined "Lewinsky Scoop Diverts UCLA Student Paper from High Road," managed to detail the entire scandal - they said a naughty! - without actually telling readers what the nasty term was. Silly kids: They name their source, verify facts, and tell it like it is? Don't they ever want to make it as professionals?
We choose not to check facts before forwarding our copy of the 6 Degrees of Monica email. As with Monica's former AOL page, this is a document whose rank banality makes it more real than the truth. Most Monica material aspires to the archly comical. Not this one. Savor the superbly crafted Kmart realism in mlewinsk@pagate.pa.osd.mil's original message (Tuesday, 18 November 1997 10:12 a.m.): "That's hilarious. How are you Josh? What's going on in your life? Monica." Flaubert himself wouldn't have had the discipline to avoid sneaking in some sly joke about how "things are really humming in DC." (The subject line, "FW: [Fwd: Fwd: [Fwd: Fwd: AXE: Resume Mistakes]]," may be a jab at the resume Matt Drudge broadcast so long ago, but that's a pretty thin gag.)
And who else but a freshly minted college graduate could ask, "What's going on in your life?" and still believe she means it? We're troubled by the fact that the original message recipient, "Josh Gross," has no email address listed, but even this adds to the message's tantalizing piquancy. Was Josh, in forwarding a list of tired workplace jokes, hoping to catch that hazel eye, impress Monica with his waggish savoir vivre? Did he forward Monica's message to the rest of the world in revenge for the pro forma "howya been?" he got in response? Unless the ghost of Raymond Carver haunts some POP server somewhere, this is the kind of elliptical drama that only comes from real life. We hope never to know for sure whether it's real.
They just come at you from all sides, don't they? While former presidential candidate Pat Robertson broadcasts warnings about undercover recruiting in schools, educators in Colorado have recently discovered a terrifying new truth about the insidious homosexual agenda: Sometimes it's not so sneaky. Gay recruiters, it turns out, are a lot like cops; sometimes they're in plainclothes ... and sometimes they patrol in uniform. Administrators at Denver's Lutheran High School realized, a couple of weeks ago, that one of their students was dressing in some suspiciously, um, fashionable clothing. There were green polyester shirts, leather pants, even the occasional "shimmery" outfit. They confronted him, and 18 year-old Jeremy Garza just came right out and admitted it: He is, yes, a mascara wearer, and his fate was sealed. As the school director told a local newspaper columnist, "He wasn't asked to leave because he is gay. He was asked because of the gay clothing, the gay jewelry." No word yet on the number of recruits Garza managed to turn before being discovered.
Even we could have seen this one coming: Inphomation Communications filed for bankruptcy last week. Just another casualty of the volatile media marketplace? Not exactly. Because, you see, (and you did see, didn't you?) in addition to making some of the Baltimore metropolitan area's finest infomercials, Inphomation operates the Psychic Friends Network. This strikes us as typical of the fast-growth start-up game, and we're embarrassed for them, if not downright empathetic: With a huge roster of unusually talented people working for the company - in this case, 2,000 staff and freelance clairvoyants - it occurred to no one to put some of them in management.
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This article appeared originally in Suck.
