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Marjorie Gottlieb Wolfe
Syosset, New York
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*The Yiddish word for redemption is "der oysleyz" or "di oysleyzung" according to Weinreich's dictionary.
What do these people have in common?
Jayson Blair
Jack Kelly
Rob Sgobbo
Stephen Glass
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Janet Cooke
They were all involved in plagiarism. Plagiarism and fictitious reporting are more or less joined at the hip. Plagiarism means that you are not sourcing things, whereas with fabrication you're sourcing things that don't exist.
Andrew Marks said, "In every profession you've got people who are complex psychological cases, who don't have moral compasses."
Janet Cooke was awarded a 1980 Pulitzer Prize for her series of articles about "Jimmy," an eight-year-old heroin addict. He was ultimately found to exist only in Cooke's vivid "fantazye" (imagination).
In 2005 a Boston Globe freelance writer
fabricated large chunks of a story published. Writer, Barbara Stewart, wrote
about a seal hunt off Newfoundland that began on a Tuesday. The problem: The
hunt had not taken place on Tuesday; it
was delayed by bad "veter" (weather).
Source: April 15, 2005, article by
Greg Frost, "Writer Fabricated Boston
Globe Story on Seal Hunt."
Rob Sgobbo, a "yung shrayber" (young writer) for the New York Daily News had a story he wrote yanked from the Village Voice's "vebzaytl" (website). He fabricated sources and lied. Sgobbo invented a Tamicka Bourges, who claimed she had emassed a large debt at Berkeley College without obtaining a degree.
NYDN spokesperson, Jennifer Mauer, said that his relationship with the Daily News was terminated.
USA Today reporter, Jack Kelley, resigned from the paper. Apparently a team of journalists has found strong "raye" (evidence) that Kelly fabricated substantial portions of at least eight major stories, lifted nealry two dozen quotes or other material from competing publications, lied in speeches he gave for the newspaper and conspired to "farfirn" (mislead) those people who were investigating his work.
In 2000, Kelly used a "fotografye" (photo/ snapshot)_he took of a Cuban hotel worker to authenticate a story he made up about a woman who died fleeing Cuba by "shifl" (boat). It was all a lie; the woman in the photo neither fled by boat nor died.
Brian VanDeMark, a tenured "profesor" at the U. S. Naval Academy, had his book, "Pandora's Keepers: Nine Men and the Atomic Bomb" recalled by its publisher, Little, Brown. It appears that more than 30 passages in the "bukh" were "identical, or nearly identical" to passages in four other books. His tenure was revoked and his salary reduced.
Even the "laytish" (respectable)/respected best-selling authors, Doris Kearns Goodwin and the late Stephen Ambrose have been found to have "borrowed" liberal amounts of text from previously published sources.
On May 1, 2003, 27-year-old New York Times reporter, Jayson Blair, resigned amidst charges that he plagiarized a story about the family of an American soldier ("zelner") in Iraq.
Blair also misled readers and Times colleagues with dispatches that purported to be from Maryland, Texas and other states when often he was in New York. He fabricated comments and concocted scenes which created the impression he had been somewhere or seen someone, when he had not.
This led to a staff shakeup ending with the resignation of two of the paper's top editors. Times publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. called the Blair scandal ("skandal") "a low point" in the paper's 152-year history.
And one of the most famous cases involved Stephen Glass. When Glass was 25-years- old he was a rising star at The New Republic. He also wrote dozens of articles for a number of national publications. 60 Minutes reported that he made up people, places, and events, as well as organizations and quotations. He created fake notes, fake voicemails, and fake faxes. He told Steve Kroft, "My life was one very long process of lying and lying again, to figure out how to cover those other lies."
Leon Wieselter said that Glass's imagination knew no bounds. There was a piece about a political memorabilia convention featuring Monica Lewinsky condoms and one about an evangelical church that worshiped George Herbert Walker Bush.
By 1998, Glass was earning more than $100,000 and selling fabricated stories to Rolling Stone, George, and Harper's Magazine. Glass drew diagrams of meetings that never occurred attended by people who didn't exist talking about events that never happened
His journalistic career ended and he spent years in therapy attempting to start over. He earned a law degree from Georgetown University and wrote a novel called "The Fabulist." It was about a young Washington reporter who is a pathological liar. (He had a six-figure advance.) Source: "Stephen Glass: I Lied For Esteem," by Rebecca Leung, www.cbs news.com)
And on Dec. 27, 2011, The New York Times had an article by Joe Nocera titled, "Glass's Road to Redemption." Glass is now 39 and is attempting to be admitted to the Calif. Bar. "Der frage"? (The question): Does the former fabulist have the right to practice law? Nocera says that "people who know him tell me that he is 'relentlessly honest.' (He won't even tell the tiniest of white lies.)
What does Judaism say about redemption? Rabbi Reuven Lauffer wrote in an e-mail: "Judaism teaches that a person who repents wholeheartedly and sincerely is considered to be righteous, and his past should not be taken into account. That would mean that, if he [Glass] truly repented, the person you ask about is considerered to be perfectly honest."
Rabbi Marc Howard Wilson, who always supplies me with "vunderlekh" answers to my many questions, wrote,
"Torah is clear that - save a handful of truly heinous crimes - one is absolved in the eyes of God if he or she is truly penitent, a baal (at) teshuvah. We are to take our lead from God and be equally forgiving when one does teshuvah--which includes regret for committing the sin, reconciliation with the affronted, and above all, resisting temptation whenever the prospect of committing the sin again arises.
Indeed, the Talmud comments that the truly penitent stands in a place where even the most righteous don't stand--some interpret this to mean that a place in paradise is reserved for baalei teshuvah more sacred than even that reserved for tzaddiim.
Unfortunately, judgmental people are so
often less forgiving than the God of Mercy.
Unfortunate. No, tragic.
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Marjorie wishes a speedy recovery to her
dear friend, Michael Hanna-Fein,
"GantsehMegillah.com."
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