"What he doesn't get is that journalism is not Hollywood. It's not about closing the deal. It's not about face time. It's about -- simply put -- telling the truth." -- Mitch Albom, Detroit Free Press columnist and author, writing about disgraced New York Times reporter, Jayson Blair.
DETROIT -- The early morning breeze across St. Peter's Square is cool and damp as workers sweep up the mess left by the throngs from around the world who passed through in recent days.
Wearing dark windbreakers over their cassocks, the two cardinals slip through the square, passing the Swiss Guards as they duck into the Sistine Chapel. They stand in silence, looking at Michelangelo's magnificent ceiling. After several prayerful minutes, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, of Argentina, whispers in Spanish-accented English, "Our time has arrived. We must set aside sadness and get on with our work." Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, of Austria, nods and replies in German-laced English, "You are right, my brother, but somehow this beautiful place will never be as it was before."
I was not eavesdropping in the Sistine Chapel and that poignant scene never occurred. But it's the kind of fabrication that's happening in journalism. Although a few are caught in their deceptions, many others foster fictions that go undetected.
Our station brass asked me if I would go to Rome when the pope died. Of course, I said yes. For whatever reasons, the plan to go was scrapped. Considering the logistical nightmare it would be just getting around Rome as millions were descending on the Eternal City, I was glad, in a way, to remain on this side of the big pond. But still, I'm a little sad. I'll post my pick for the next pope next week. Irish bookies are waiting for any hints.
Saying you are somewhere you are not, describing scenes and events that have not occurred and manufacturing conversations certainly are rare deceptions for reporters and columnists, but even one is too many.
We live in a political era in which the lies coming from the White House are legion and routine.
Even when exposed, too many people simply shrug them off as expected behavior. So many still buy the fabricated reasons for the war in Iraq. It's like their minds are immune to the truth. No matter how much evidence exposes the fraud, they still lap up the lies of President George W. Bush.
Mitch Albom is a one-man media machine, and he's become fabulously wealthy. He's the author of "Tuesdays with Morrie," a book that spent years on The New York Times best-sellers list, where the paperback edition remains. The story of Albom's visits with his dying, former college professor was also made into a film starring the late Jack Lemmon. Albom's "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" has been firmly planted on the best-sellers list for 79 weeks now and was also made into a TV movie.
He's written a play, "Duck Hunter Shoots Angel," which was performed at actor Jeff Daniels' Purple Rose Theatre in Chelsea, Mich.
Albom does sports commentary on ESPN. His afternoon drive-time radio talk show is nationally syndicated. He's a talented musician and a skilled boxer.
Modest Mitch has a home in suburban Detroit, a Colorado ski-country pad and digs in Malibu, Calif. He frequently travels around the world, usually on someone else's dime.
But Albom's favorite forum and the foundation for his fortune is his job as a sports columnist for the Detroit Free Press. He was blessed to arrive on the scene here in 1985, when the Detroit Tigers were the reigning World Series champs and baseball fever gripped the town. The Free Press hired him to replace the popular Mike Downey, who left for a bigger-bucks gig with the Los Angeles Times.
Albom's column quickly became popular. He wrote about the Tigers and other sports figures, often describing their personal lives and sharing his thoughts about games as metaphors for life.
When the business operations and weekend editions of the Free Press and Detroit News combined under a government-sanctioned monopoly, the corporate Marxists from Knight-Ridder and Gannett who orchestrated that greedy fraud decided the popular Mitch had to have a Sunday pulpit.
Now Albom could write about broader topics and public issues, still spiced with his folksy touch. At the paper, Albom become known as the guy who could spin straw into gold. He always seemed to come up with the touching story, filled with moving quotes and rich detail. People bared their souls to Albom. As his multimedia career blossomed, colleagues at the paper wondered how he found the time to talk with so many people, to do so many things and to be in so many places. Now we know how. In at least in one case, and perhaps more, he resorted to shortcuts and fabrications.
Albom got caught last week writing a story about events at a basketball game before it was played. He described reactions of fans in the stands that didn't make it to the game. The column was about former Michigan State basketball players Mateen Cleaves and Jason Richardson being thrilled to sit together in St. Louis for the Final Four game against North Carolina. Albom described how the two, now both in the NBA, "made it a point to fly in from wherever they were in their professional schedule just to sit together Saturday." Always with a keen eye for detail, Albom wrote, "They sat in the stands in their MSU clothing, and rooted for their alma mater."
The column was an ode to college life and the fun Cleaves and Richardson had in their playing days when Michigan State won the national championship, and how the players were like a loving family. Not so in the big-time NBA, Albom noted. The reader got the impression that Mitch, Mateen and Jason rooted for the Spartans and had a beer or two after the game.
Albom likes to draw on folksy aphorisms from Morrie Schwartz, his late Uncle Eddie, or anyone who fits into the point he's making -- usually from the unverifiable departed who have communicated only with their trusted minstrel Mitch.
Albom wrapped up the column with touching nostalgia. "I remember, as a kid, some older relatives offering this advice: Don't be in such a hurry to grow up. It's not as great as you think. You looked around the stands Saturday, and you realized the truth: that you never know how right they are until you're the one saying it," Albom wrote. Readers welled up with tears. Noble Mitch had tugged at their hearts again. Bravo! Another Albom gem. Michigan State lost the game, but what the hell. The readers felt happy thinking Mitch again found gold in the gulch of defeat.
The column appeared in the Free Press on Sunday morning, April 3. Several other papers posted the syndicated column on their Web sites on Saturday. Many people actually read the column long before the contest began. That's how Albom's deception unraveled.
He wrote and filed the column on Friday, the day before the game. The dateline read St. Louis, but Mitch was nowhere near the Show Me State. The lid blew off the deception when Cleaves and Richardson were no-shows at the game. The scenes Albom described were pure fiction.
Four days later, trapped in the web of his deception, Albom apologized to his readers, saying he was "caught in an assumption," and explaining that Cleaves and Richardson had told him they planned to go to the game. He also brought his editors in for some blame.
On his radio show, Albom called the incident a "gaffe" and a "rookie journalistic mistake." It's a gaffe and a mistake to confuse Niagara Avenue with Niagara Street. It's a fabrication for me to pretend to describe details about the crowd at a Niagara University basketball game when I'm sitting in my living room in Michigan -- especially before they happen.
The Free Press has yanked Albom from the paper -- an unstated suspension with his juicy salary still flowing -- as an internal investigation looks at his past columns to determine whether other deceptions have occurred.
Dave Robinson, a deputy managing editor at the paper, told "Editor and Publisher" that Albom's error was "a serious but not a firing offense." That's an interesting -- and premature -- verdict, since the reporters at the Free Press assigned to review Albom's work have just begun examining the evidence.
The Free Press ethics policy is perfectly clear. "We don't mislead readers," it states. In the same paragraph, an apt description prohibits just what Albom did: "We don't imply we have witnessed events we haven't seen or been in places we haven't been."
Albom has long been a privileged and pampered figure at the Free Press. It's impossible to believe his editors were unaware of his fabricated description of the scene at an event that had not yet occurred. It's clear that no one dared criticize the paper's "franchise" columnist.
In a telling episode, Carole Leigh Hutton, the publisher and editor of the paper, set the tone for protecting Albom from criticism and showed her willingness to compromise journalistic integrity in the process. A Free Press editor commissioned freelance critic Carlo Wolff to review Albom's "The Five People You Meet in Heaven." He did and he panned it. One of his lines was, "How many ways can you define 'superficial'?" Another was, "While many aspire to write the 'The Great American Novel' Albom aspires to write the 'Great American Postcard.'" The review was published elsewhere, but Hutton spiked it, making sure no Free Press ink would be used to criticize her boy Mitch.
But she wasted plenty of ink in the rambling apologia she wrote to justify deep-sixing the review. "It came down to a decision about how I want the Free Press to treat its employees," Hutton told readers. She didn't want to hurt Albom's feelings in that situation, but she has consistently enabled his conduct that has tarnished the reputation and credibility of the newspaper.
The Albom incident outrages most Free Press staffers -- committed professionals who work hard every day to tell the truth in a timely fashion, not to shape the truth to fit their schedules. They also complain that his remarks about the incident on his radio show were flippant and don't reflect the seriousness of the issue.
National Society of Newspaper Columnists President Suzette Martinez Standring called Albom's column "bogus." She said, "This is an egregious ethical lapse. Prophesying the future should be clearly labeled as such." She further wondered "what kind of pressure is regularly brought to bear on writers to jump the gun, and keep their fingers crossed that the future unfolds as written."
In Albom's case, though, I don't think pressure was the big issue. He could have written the piece in a number of different ways or he could have chosen to write about something else. His editors would have taken anything Lord Albom deigned to submit. But it's clear he followed his appetite for mushy, feel-good stuff and fictionalized the scene accordingly. It was not the deadline but his dead-head decision that got Albom into his self-created pickle.
On his radio show, he often uses his Limbaughesque bully pulpit to slam the work of others in the media who don't meet his "high standards" of embellished excellence. On a couple of shows, he criticized at length my colleague and friend, Scott Lewis -- an exceptional reporter with a passion for accuracy -- for using music in his reports. The music is always apt, often hilarious and only buttresses the substance of the reports.
I have met Albom a couple of times. For a few years, he did commentaries at our station. Under the heading of full disclosure, I am not a fan. If arrogance and ego could reach critical mass and fusion, Albom would be a 50-megaton atomic bomb.
He'd pull up at the station in a limo and come in and record a voice track and lengthy stand-ups. He seemed to relish "face time."
While he is talented in print, Albom's TV-writing skills proved to be limited. We do what's called "writing to the video." That means the words you write will match and conform to the visual images. Since the video you have is a given, the words you write should play off those pictures.
Albom didn't play by those rules. He'd write a long essay and expect that the video to cover his words would magically appear. Of course, the great Mitch couldn't be troubled to do the grunt work of finding the video. He'd leave that task to an overworked producer.
Albom liked to have the photographers come to his home, so the king often didn't even have to leave his castle. Many who have worked with him have found he can be less than pleasant. He sucks up to the famous and powerful, but is highhanded with those not serving his immediate purposes.
Albom's deception is minor compared to Jayson Blair's serial lying. But what he did is troubling. Putting his large body of work under careful scrutiny may yield some interesting results.
With millions of dollars already in the bank and more on the way, he doesn't need his job at the Free Press, but his ego craves the forum. If the paper chooses to discipline him further -- an unlikely event -- he might pout and take a walk, leaving the honorable people at the newspaper to clean up his mess.
His plight has inspired some humor, though. On a sports journalists' Internet blog, one clever soul did a little alteration on the cover of Albom's latest book. It shows pictures of Mateen Cleaves and Jason Richardson flanking the St. Louis Arch with the new title, "The Two People You Don't Meet in St. Louis."
Leon Freilich offered some poetry on Jim Romenesko's blog on the Poynter site.
You're calling Mitch Albom
With a host of queries?
He's busy describing
The next World Series.
And I especially enjoyed Suzette Martinez Standring's line: "If you say you spend Tuesdays with Morrie, you shouldn't write about it on Mondays."
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | April 12 2005 |