Maine not likely to fall for a ruse

Every few years, it seems, we hear of another journalist at a large city newspaper being fired in disgrace for trying to pass off fiction as fact.

Janet Cooke did a masterful job of it back in the 1980s by inventing a child heroin addict who could break the hearts of readers and maybe even earn the deceptive reporter a Pultizer Prize in the process. Cooke pulled it off, too, before the fraud was discovered and she lost both the prize and her job.

Then there was Patricia Smith, another talented writer and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, who apparently thought nothing of making up people and attributing quotes to them for her column in the Boston Globe. Smith admitted to creating at least four imaginary characters in one year alone, including a cancer patient named Claire who talked poignantly in a column about her hope that a promising new drug would cure her.

Her colleague at the Globe, the once-esteemed columnist Mike Barnicle, also was canned for introducing his readers to people whose life stories would have been a lot more credible if only they’d had birth certificates to back them up.

The most recent scandal to rock the journalism world, as you might have read, involved a young and ambitious New York Times reporter whose trail of deception turned out to be so extensive that his paper needed four full pages to document some of the offenses.

Jayson Blair might not have gone so far as to make up people out of thin air, but it appears he made up just about everything else for many of his stories, including interviews he never conducted and scenes he never witnessed.

In one case, the former reporter proved the true power of the written word by miraculously providing a West Virginia house with a lovely view of tobacco fields and cattle pastures that the homeowners had never seen before.

What allowed Blair to perpetuate his many frauds – aside from those editors who suspected wrongdoing but did nothing to stop it – is that few of the people misrepresented in his fanciful stories bothered to call the paper with complaints.

Having written countless stories of people and places in Maine over the last 20 years or so, I can assure you, dear reader, that such egregious journalistic violations simply could not happen here.

Unlike readers in places such as Washington, D.C., New York or Boston, where imaginary newspaper subjects apparently can enjoy their celebrity for quite some time without being detected, Maine people know their neighbors, their small towns and their natural surroundings much too well to be taken in by such fabrications.

Contriving so much as a single, gently rolling potato field for literary effect would probably cause half the people in the Aroostook County town to go out looking for the unfamiliar acreage and the phantom farmer who put it into production without telling anyone else.

In small-town Maine, where everyone knows everyone else’s business, being anonymous is nearly impossible for even the real, flesh-and-blood inhabitants. If a living, breathing townsperson fails to show up at the coffee shop, the grocery store or the Wal-Mart for a few days, he is bound to be missed. People will automatically wonder where he is and what’s happened to him.

If I were ever so bold as to increase my state’s population by conjuring up even one phony individual, and providing him with a name, a home and a touching tale of hardship to relate, everyone in town would call to ask about the newcomer in their midst and where they should bring their casseroles and money to help the poor guy through his miserable ordeal.

Imaginary townspeople, no matter how poignant their tales or how colorful their lives might look in the morning newspaper, don’t stand a ghost of a chance of surviving in Maine for long.

And yes, you can quote me on that.