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R E C E N T L Y

Is Time brain-dead?
By Janelle Brown
Ally McBeal and other "silliness" prompts the magazine to ask, "Is feminism dead?" But it's the question itself that's silly
(06/25/98)

Our tchotchkes, ourselves
By James Poniewozik
Is the unexamined living room worth living in?
(06/24/98)

Hearsay rules
By David Corn
Matt Drudge's no-standards journalism invades the networks
(06/19/98)

L.A.'s battle of the books
By Dwight Garner
Is the Los Angeles Times Book Review the second coming of the New York Review -- or an elitist section that doesn't serve its readers?
(06/18/98)

Hamburger Hades
By Jon Carroll
Robin Cook's "Toxin" is a tale told by a hack, full of E. coli, signifying that the beef industry is the tool of Satan. Yum!
(06/16/98)

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CONFABULATION CRISIS | PAGE 1, 2

In a statement from Dublin, where he was on vacation, Barnicle angrily denied the accusation. This was not, however, the first time Barnicle had had to defend his integrity. In 1973, a Boston service station owner sued Barnicle and the Globe for libel, charging that Barnicle had falsely attributed a racial slur to him. While admitting nothing, Barnicle and the Globe settled the suit in 1982 for about $40,000.

On Sunday, the water grew yet deeper when the Globe ran a long front-page piece about the Smith fiasco by media reporter Mark Jurkowitz that detailed, among other things, how Globe editors had hesitated to act on concerns about Smith's veracity dating back about three years because they had done nothing about similar accusations of fakery against Barnicle. Sometime in late 1995 or early 1996, Jurkowitz wrote, assistant managing editor Walter Robinson, at the time in charge of local news, had subjected several of Smith's columns to post-publication fact-checking and become sufficiently convinced they contained falsehoods to confront her on the matter -- twice. Jurkowitz quotes Robinson as saying, "She didn't respond."

Why wasn't she fired or at least disciplined? According to Globe spokesman Richard Gulla, "The fact that one can't verify the existence of a person using databases or whatever doesn't mean that person doesn't exist. In the absence of an admission it's very hard to do anything. [The columnist] can say, 'They're homeless or they don't have a phone.'"

And then there was the problem of Barnicle. As Globe editor Matthew Storin told Jurkowitz, "I knew going way back that people said Barnicle made things up ... To the best of my knowledge, the paper had not addressed the Barnicle questions head on. I had this very talented black woman ... How then can I take action against this woman under these circumstances?"

Instead Storin presented Smith, Barnicle and the paper's third metro section columnist, Eileen McNamara, with a warning about not making stuff up and then required columnists to submit to sporadic fact-checking by their editors. Indeed, they ultimately reviewed 364 of Barnicle's columns dating back to January 1996, and in a tepidly worded editor's note accompanying the Sunday Jurkowitz story, editor Storin wrote, "We believe these columns met professional standards and we believe [Barnicle's] own assertions ... that this is so." An exoneration maybe, but not exactly "We stand by our story."

As the sainted Murray Kempton once noted, journalists don't have thin skin, they have no skin. On Tuesday Barnicle responded with a furious column, a masterpiece of petulance and self-pity, datelined Dublin, in which he compared himself to Irish nationalist hero Michael Collins ("shot to death by his own people") and fulminated that the "Globe chose to put me on the rack to appear even-handed within the politically correct agenda-driven journalism of the age." Employing the "I speak for Knocko Minehan in Dorchester" shtick that is his primary stock-in-trade, Barnicle expressed amazement that the salt of the earth whose lives he faithfully chronicles "are thought to be fiction by the isolated or the affluent." Barnicle closed with this: "I am proud of what I do, yet, believe me, no paycheck is worth a reputation."

Gulla, the Globe's director of public affairs, who returned a call to top editor Storin, says the brass at the paper did not read Barnicle's remark as a threat to quit. Barnicle did not return a call for comment. But any hope for his imminent departure was crushed by his Thursday column, which was about his dog eating his golf clubs.

There's no honor for anybody in this particular car wreck. The most significant losers are, of course, the Globe's editors, who, for three years, tolerated a woman they had reason to believe was a liar and even submitted her work for a Pulitzer Prize. As for Barnicle and Dershowitz, it is tempting to see their feud as a trivial battle of celebrity blowhards, and maybe it is. The sorry point that underlies it, though, is that readers deserve more than columnists who spew inky black outrage when questioned. They, we, deserve writers who are honest and accountable.
SALON | June 26, 1998