THE GLOBE, COLUMNISTS, AND THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH

Author(s):    Mark Jurkowitz, Globe Staff Date: June 21, 1998 Page: A1 Section: Metro

Nearly three years ago, Boston Globe editors first saw evidence of the fabrication problem that culminated in columnist Patricia Smith's resignation from the paper on Thursday. But she was given a second chance, in part, because Globe Editor Matthew V. Storin was concerned that the paper had never really "addressed . . . head on" lingering accusations that columnist Mike Barnicle had also included false information in his pieces.

 

[In the wake of a Globe review of all of Barnicle's columns since 1996, Storin yesterday expressed confidence in Barnicle's integrity. (See accompanying story, Page A28)]. Smith, 42, an award-winning columnist, well-known poet, and a prominent local voice on racial issues, resigned after admitting to inventing characters in four 1998 columns. On Friday, the Smith episode ensnared Barnicle when Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz accused the Globe of "a double standard" for not similarly disciplining Barnicle for a 1990 column that Dershowitz said contained a fabricated quote.

 

Dershowitz said the quote attributed to him, "I love Asian women, don't you? They're . . . they're so submissive," was fiction. The dispute was highly publicized at the time and neither the Globe nor Barnicle ever acknowledged the quote was concocted. On Friday, Barnicle said he had "never violated the trust my publisher has placed in me" in 25 years as a Globe columnist.

 

But it seems clear that Storin -- who left the Globe in 1985, returned in 1992 and became editor in 1993 -- was concerned about Barnicle's reputation when questions about Smith's 1995 columns first came to his attention.

 

Storin said that when possible problems with Smith surfaced several years ago, she "entered the framework" in which the long-standing questions about Barnicle existed. "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 this circumstance?"

 

Instead of moving formally against Smith at the time, Storin gave the Globe's three Metro columnists -- Barnicle, Smith and Eileen McNamara -- the "rules of the road" governing accuracy in the columns, and established a more formal editing and monitoring procedure.

 

"Everybody was put on equal footing," said Managing Editor Gregory L. Moore. "And the clock started ticking then."

 

When Assistant Managing Editor Walter V. Robinson, who initially flagged the possible 1995 Smith fabrications, identified new concerns earlier this year, it triggered the chain of events that ended with Smith's stunning departure.

 

The Rules of the Road

 

Robinson was in charge of local news when Smith got her column in 1994. "I championed her becoming a Metro columnist at this newspaper," he said. "She was an extraordinary voice." (Smith was not available for comment for this story.)

 

Sometime in late 1995 or early 1996, Robinson recalled, "low-level chatter in the newsroom" and a call from a reader expressing doubts about a Smith column caused him to review her 1995 work. "I had alerted Matt [Storin] and [Executive Editor] Helen [W. Donovan] that I thought there was a problem and I offered to do further research," said Robinson. "I ultimately went back to them with a large number of columns from that year that I feared . . . contained falsehoods."

 

He said he met twice with Smith on the matter and "told her about the fruits of the research. She didn't respond."

 

When the matter moved into the top editors' offices, it was then that Barnicle became something of a dilemma for Storin in his handling of Smith. "I honestly had to weigh that against the question of how Barnicle had been handled," he said. "I feel . . . a little bit personally the victim of accusations about Barnicle's past."

 

There was also one nagging item from Smith's past when she was an editorial assistant at the Chicago Sun-Times. According to Globe Arts Editor Scott Powers, who was then assistant managing editor for features at the Sun-Times, errors in a Smith review -- and the fact that she did not pick up her press tickets -- generated suspicions that she did not attend an Elton John concert she wrote about in 1986. According to Powers, Smith insisted she had attended the concert, decided to use lawn ticketspurchased by a friend, and produced notes from the event. There was never any proof or finding that she missed the concert. But the Sun-Times published a correction about song titles and John's attire and Smith was barred from writing for several months.

 

Storin, who became editor of the Sun-Times after that incident and came back to the Globe after Smith was hired here, was aware of that episode when he was in Chicago. But "I never really thought much about it until this stuff first came up" at the Globe, he said.

 

When Storin -- with the Barnicle question hanging over his head -- spoke to Smith after the 1995 red flags, he voiced concern, but did not ask her directly whether she had fabricated column material. After making sure that Smith now knew the "rules of the road," he issued the same caution to Barnicle and McNamara. Barnicle had no problems with that, Storin said. And "with Eileen, there had never been any question raised, but I felt she had to know what was going on."

 

According to Moore, who began editing Smith's columns in early 1996, the monitoring consisted largely of "asking for a message or a note asking who these people were, where they could be found." He said that "the . . . presentation of the evidence" was accepted on its face as substantiation of accuracy, and no further checking was done. Managing Editor/News Operations Thomas F. Mulvoy Jr., who has overseen Barnicle's column for many years, said that under the new system, Barnicle providednames and phone numbers of people he cited in his columns roughly a dozen times. "Then it eased off," he said.

 

McNamara is edited by Donovan, who said the columnist would provide her with background on people mentioned in her column. But "most of her columns involve a level of reporting and detail that you would have no reason" to question them, Donovan said. "There have never been any questions raised." (Donovan did recall one minor controversy when McNamara wrote a 1997 column about a conference in Salem, which included a Salem dateline even though McNamara hadn't attended the event. Donovan said McNamara had done sufficient reporting on the conference to avoid any improprieties.)

 

"For a while, I asked if this was being done," said Storin, of the monitoring. And at some point, the more intense scrutiny of the columns ceased. The editor said he read Smith's columns "with the assumption she was being careful . . . I guess I just had too much faith in her."

 

Storin also said Smith seemed shaken by the "rules of the road" discussion and for a while, "the quality of her work seemed to suffer." But by 1997, Smith was back in stride. Her work that year garnered an American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award and she was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. (A Globe review has turned up no known problems with Smith's Pulitzer and ASNE submissions. But all of her columns since 1996 are being reviewed. Storin said that in hindsight, it was wrong to submit her work for awards.) She had become such a hot commodity that the Globe gave her a raise to fend off a Philadelphia Inquirer bid to woo her earlier this year.

 

But in mid-May, Robinson "had a chance encounter with other members of the staff," who were concerned about a May 11 Smith column in which she wrote about a cancer patient named Claire who was reacting to news of a treatment that showed promise in mice.

 

"It obviously, because of what had happened before, prompted me to do a quick review of recent columns," he said. "In some of them, I found a return to the pattern that aroused suspicions before -- named people with incomplete identifiers saying things that in some cases seemed more eloquent than one would expect."

 

Looking at about a dozen columns, Robinson "identified several that I thought raised the same set of issues," and brought them to the attention of top editors.

 

Robinson "had told me he had talked with Helen [Donovan] and he had seen disturbing inconsistencies in [Smith's] column," said Moore. "Basically, we said `This looks troubling, but we've got to be sure.' "

 

When Robinson's crosschecks of voter registration records, telephone databases, the Registry of Motor Vehicles and other sources did not turn up some individuals mentioned in the columns, top editors decided it was time to discuss the matter with Smith. So Moore set up a lunch at 1:30 p.m. last Wednesday at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge.

 

The managing editor's memory of the fateful meeting is vivid. And so is his recollection of an eerie moment. After Smith sat down, she told Moore what her horoscope had said that morning: "Be careful in dealing with your boss today. Misunderstandings could lead to the loss of a job."

 

After some conversation, Moore told her that "you can't believe everything you read in the horoscope, but . . ." and he handed Smith a list of a half-dozen names and asked her to verify their existence.

 

In the course of two hours, Moore said, Smith went from defensive to silent and finally to reflective. She admitted that four of the people were figments of her imagination.

 

"I really don't know why I'm telling you this, but it sure feels good," Moore quoted her as finally saying. "She apologized. She said she didn't mean to hurt anybody."

 

The four fabricated characters include: the cancer patient Claire; a worker named Jim Burke who was erecting barricades for the Boston Marathon; a cosmetologist named Janine Byrne, who was commenting on the case of kidnapping defendant Stephen Fagan; and a woman named Dorothy Gibson whose young daughter was getting a painful hair makeover for Easter. Burke and Byrne are basically supporting characters in those columns, but Claire was the heart of the column and the fact that Gibson didn't exist cast doubt on the entirety of that column. All four columns were published in April and May of this year.

 

When Moore returned from his meeting with Smith on Wednesday afternoon, a top-level meeting was convened with him, Storin, Donovan, Mulvoy and Managing Editor/Administration Louisa Williams. At that point, the decision was made to seek Smith's resignation, address the staff, and publish a story explaining what had happened.

 

"We had, in effect, given her a second chance," said Storin. "There wasn't going to be a third."

 

At noon on Thursday, less than 24 hours after the Moore-Smith meeting, Storin told a stunned Globe staff that one of the paper's top stars had flamed out. Obviously, each fabrication "violates the sacred trust that the Globe has with its readers," he said. "This is a painful time for both her and the newspaper."

 

By the end of that day, Smith had agreed to resign. And the next morning, the Globe published her farewell column. In it, she said she had violated one of the "cardinal sins of journalism: Thou shall not fabricate. No exceptions. No excuses." She explained that because she did not get that " `correct' start in journalism, I set out to be 10 times as good by doing 10 times as much . . . But I didn't establish priorities, and the first casualty was time."

 

Many Globe staffers thought the first half of her column was contrite and the second half was mostly defiant.

 

"To those colleagues and readers who salivated daily at the thought of my head on a platter," she wrote, "congrats."

 

The Barnicle standard

 

Back in 1982, when he was managing editor at the Globe, Storin remembers checking on the accuracy of a Barnicle column about opening day at Fenway Park. It turned out to be fine. And "during the time I have been editor of this paper," he said, "I have had no reason to doubt the authenticity of Mike Barnicle's columns."

 

But questions about whether Barnicle embellishes his column have percolated over the years, with matters really heating up in the early '90s. A primary catalyst was Dershowitz's charge that Barnicle had manufactured a sexist and boorish quote about him in 1990. When the Harvard law professor went on television at that time to invite anyone else who'd been similarly treated to step forward, it unearthed the story of a Dorchester gas station proprietor who sued for libel over a 1973 column, claiming that he'd never made a racist statement Barnicle attributed to him. The case had ended with the Globe paying the plaintiff a total of about $40,000.

 

At about the same time, Boston magazine began a column checking the authenticity of some of Barnicle's columns. And in a 1991 column on the Dershowitz case, then Globe ombudsman Gordon McKibben concluded that "the way the hoary quote is inserted at the end of the column . . . invites skeptics, including me, to marvel at Barnicle's confidence in his recall."

 

"There certainly was a good amount of scrutiny in connection with the Dershowitz column," said John S. Driscoll, who was Globe editor at the time. Driscoll also recalled requiring Barnicle to divulge the names of sources when he was writing about the Charles Stuart/Carol DiMaiti Stuart murder case in 1990. Driscoll explained that he required that Metro columnists be edited at the managing editor level, but he didn't indicate that there was any fact-checking system in place.

 

"I never found him guilty of fabrication," said Driscoll.

 

Thomas Winship, who was Globe editor from 1965 to 1984, said the "Globe had no alternative but to accept Patricia Smith's resignation," adding that "as for Mike Barnicle, I always have had every confidence in his performance on my watch."

 

Mulvoy, who has been "the last reader" of Barnicle's column since the early 1980s, says "if something seemed wild I would ask him or Jack [Driscoll] would ask him. But that was rarely the case."

 

"In all my dealings with Mike over the years, I don't believe I ever thought he was fabricating material," said Mulvoy. "If I did, I would have said so. I just think from what I know that there have been a lot of unfair assaults on his integrity in the last 24 hours."

 

In a statement released Friday, Barnicle said he had not "violated the trust, faith and confidence I hope my readers have placed in me. This is a sad time for the paper and Patricia Smith. It is particularly despicable that a pack of parasites has been participating in a feeding frenzy over the misfortune of others."

 

Still, as the Globe rechecked 30 months' worth of Barnicle columns, editors heard the charges that Smith was cashiered for something Barnicle has been accused of. On Friday, Dershowitz suggested the Globe might be guilty of a double standard rooted in "race, gender, and ethnicity."

 

Editors at the paper "are aware of allegations of a double standard," said Storin. "We believe our actions in Patricia's case were fully considered and fair. We would respond in the same way in any other instance involving the same issues."

 

As he reflected on the "tragic development" that befell both the Globe and Smith in recent days, Storin said, "Sure, hindsight is 20/20. I also believed I played the hand I was dealt.

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