How Do You Spell Truth?
The technicians are not journalists anymore than a limo driver who takes me to a concert is a journalist. For his premise to stand on its own two wobbly legs, Mr. Rutten had to kiss honesty goodbye. Being a hardline liberal, they were not close friends anyway. Their parting was unemotional. As an aroused apostle of the anti-war set, Mr. Rutten may have been staring at an upside down picture of Cindy Sheehan on his desk when he began to lay out his piece. For the consumption of his readers, he was mourning the serious bombing injury suffered by a veteran but still little known television correspondent. His thesis would have disappeared faster than a Democrat at a church service if he had anchored his essay around the merely injured reporter, Kimberly Dozier. He felt he needed a body to make his case. In desperation, he wadded up his integrity, like a used kleenex, and pitched it through the nearest window.
What Is It That Smells?
While digesting Mr. Rutten’s essay, I wondered, idly, if his family may have been the inspiration for the bon mot that “something is Rutten in .” Anyway, at stake here is the vital but frail concept of journalistic integrity. Integrity is delicate. Like a window, it is easily, sometimes temptingly, breakable. Like a window, you cannot unbreak integrity. You may commit an error. But when you recast facts, this is serious territory, minefield stuff.
A Different Kind of Mess
Earlier this week when I was writing about a car that crashed into a building, I typed that that the car was traveling on “Saturday Boulevard” instead of on
. That was sloppy and careless, but not deliberate. The linguistic stunt that Mr. Rutten pulled was quite different, quite intentional. He meant to co-opt readers around to his point of view by unethically altering a definition. This kind of misdirection, invidious and blatant as it was, undoubtedly was missed by many because it was subtle, and ignored by other readers. Still, it is a big deal, ethically. Morally, it matters.
Another Liberal Tendency
As a liberal, Mr. Rutten typically chose the easy angle, even if he had to give birth to an imagined definition. He could have challenged his mind and produced a nearly identical thesis. By laboring a little harder and valuing moral, linguistic precision more than a boffo angle, he could have produced an essay just as strong. He could have led with Ms. Dozier’s threatening injuries and built his piece around the same premise. Instead, he chose trying to make a mule out of a dog. They both stand on four legs, don’t they?