ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, July 28, 1996 TAG: 9607300116
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALAN SORENSEN EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
"MY CREDIBILITY as a journalist has never been questioned," Joe Klein said the other day. That wasn't exactly true.
Certainly, the Newsweek columnist's credibility was questioned in the past week, after he was forced to confess his "Anonymous" authorship of "Primary Colors."
The problem wasn't that he wrote the book. It's that he repeatedly, even aggressively, denied doing so to friends, colleagues and the public.
Trust me on this: Anonymity can get you into trouble.
I've long admired Klein's columns. I enjoyed the novel. I believed his published denials. So I took the news that he is "Anonymous" somewhat personally.
Not to make too big a deal of this. It's not as though Klein's admission has wreaked awful damage on journalists' credibility, which I gather is about on a par with that of arms merchants, used-car salesmen and lawyers. Still, I felt a bit betrayed.
On our editorial pages, we steer clear of anonymity.
We routinely get letters denouncing us as liberal apologists, not to mention flat-out liars. Only they don't always put it so nicely. Assuming basic standards of taste don't get in the way, we give highest priority for publication to letters that criticize the newspaper or that differ with our editorial positions.
But we don't run the unsigned stuff. While this predictably includes the most hateful mail, that's not why it doesn't get in. It's because we publish letters only from readers willing to associate their names with their opinions. Klein, I imagine, could understand why.
Occasionally we get letters from people whose signature is a lie. Pseudonyms in this case aren't a literary device, and we don't want letters with fake signatures finding their way into print. For one thing, the fictional name might be a real person's.
So we try to verify authorship of every letter we publish. We either call the writer or compare signatures with past letters from the same person. While not fool-proof, this policy protects readers as well as the newspaper.
It does so in part because we can't, as a practical matter, apply the same standards of fact-checking and other scrutiny to letters as we do to copy written by our staff. Verifying authorship helps support the credibility of letters columns, we hope, by adding an element of accountability.
No doubt politicians, CEOs and others have submitted ghost-written commentaries. They're still accountable for the opinions expressed under their name.
So are we, on the editorial board, accountable for the newspaper's institutional views, published unsigned on the left side of the Opinion page. The names of those responsible - or, if you like, culpable - appear at the bottom of the editorial columns every day.
Personally, I was offended to read, in a recent profile of Roanoke County activist Don Terp, that he once perpetrated a fraud in our letters columns. As a leading opponent of Roanoke city-county consolidation a few years ago, Terp organized a letter-writing campaign. "I wrote most of the letters," he said, "even though somebody else signed them."
Oh really?
I'm not so naive to think that letter-writing campaigns never occur, or that their results never are published. But, again, we make a good-faith effort to verify authorship.
We also impose a limit of one letter per person per 60 days. Terp intended to get his work into print surreptitiously. When someone who signed one of his letters was called by our staff and asked if he or she had written it, the person presumably lied.
This isn't like White House form letters, which everyone knows Bill Clinton doesn't write. Terp violated an expectation of most of our readers, I suspect, that letters to the editor are written by the people who sign them. In any case, it's strange that a man considering a run for Board of Supervisors would boast of his mendacity.
Klein's evasion of association with his work also showed less-than-noble intent and violated reasonable expectations. I believe he did it, at least in part, to deposit money in his pockets and dirt on the Clintons.
The Anonymous authorship of "Primary Colors" unquestionably boosted sales. Not only did it fuel speculation about the author's identity. It buttressed the assumption that the book must have been written by someone close to the Clintons, offering up merciless truth thinly disguised as fiction.
Klein evidently felt betrayed by the figure he once admired. In a 1994 Newsweek story, "The Politics of Promiscuity," he argued that Clinton's personal penchant for playing loose with the truth had corrupted his public career.
Yet, in his coming-out press conference earlier this month, Klein insisted his eviscerating portrait of candidate Jack Stanton in "Primary Colors" bore no relation to the real Clinton. The columnist/celebrity novelist wanted to have it every which way.
Sure, fiction conveys truth. And it's fine Klein is making millions from his novel. There's still no defense for allowing his denials to be repeated in print and on TV news until he was exposed by a Washington Post handwriting analysis. He could have said: "no comment."
Now journalists must suffer the comment of Clinton adviser James Carville: "Reporters," he said, "lie all the time."
Reporters do occasionally use anonymous sources, not always for good reason. But one of Klein's defenses - that his denial was like lying to protect a source - only compounds the insult to the news business. Lying and refusing to divulge information are not the same thing.
We come back to accountability.
Harvard's Robert Putnam has observed that "deliberative democracy is not merely about expressing opinions, and it is undermined by anonymity and incivility. It requires that we take responsibility for our own views and test them in give and take with others who take us seriously."
We take our readers seriously. And we don't want to publish something we know to be untrue.
You see, we do have standards.
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