Plagerizers appeal to editors' prejudices

It’s interesting how often race and class prejudice show up in these discredited stories. Janet Cooke’s Pulitzer was for a feature about an 8-year-old black heroin addict. Ruth Shalit, The New Republic’s star plagiarizer, attacked the Washington Post in an error- strewn piece for pandering to racial sensitivities. (Her editor, Andrew Sullivan, is now enjoying himself at the Times’s expense–but while the Times prostrated itself with a 14,000-word article detailing Blair’s derelictions, The New Republic issued only pro forma regret.) Jay Forman’s mostly invented Slate article on the obscure Florida sport of monkey- fishing in the mangroves played to stereotypes about backwoods Southerners–they eat squirrels and sleep with their sisters, so why wouldn’t they fish for monkeys, too?

At the present moment, the question of whether Rick Bragg personally witnessed the “jumping mullet that belly-flop with a sharp clap into steel- gray water” is trivial compared with Judith Miller’s credulous reports on Iraq. Here we have a Pulitzer-winning reporter who alleges that an unnamed Iraqi scientist has proof both of WMDs and of Saddam’s connections with Al Qaeda and Syria. Miller got this fascinating scoop from her Army handlers– she never questioned him herself; indeed, she never even met him! She allowed the Army to vet her copy and determine the timing of its publication. Result: a front-page story that was trumpeted everywhere as the retroactive justification for war.

Where were the editors who should have reined in this Administration- friendly flight of fancy? The person who put Miller’s story on page one has more to answer for than the harried administrator who didn’t notice that Blair’s travel receipts were from a Starbucks in Brooklyn.