"Before she was fired Oct. 17 for plagiarism and fabrication, former Bakersfield Californian reporter Nada Behziz signed her name to 96 stories. A Californian investigation shows more than a third contain a variety of serious problems including plagiarized material, misattributed quotes and information, factual errors or people whose existence could not be verified — including seven physicians and a UCLA professor."
That's the lead of a Nov. 16 story by Gretchen Wenner, Bakersfield Californian staff writer.
When it came out, newsrooms were buzzing across the state. The first e-mail comment I saw said only, "whoa." Then there was this: "Oh my God."
Tonya Luiz, our managing editor, followed with this e-mail, "I don't get it. I don't understand what would prompt a reporter to fabricate such a web of lies in these post-Jayson Blair times. But to be so sloppy about it is even more curious."
And so it goes.
Someone asked me, "Has the Tracy Press ever had a problem with plagiarism?"
Yes, we have. We had a columnist years ago who was fired when a copy editor "googled" some of his sentences and found them word-for-word on a Web site, written by someone else.
Other than that, no. We've had our suspicions at times, but nothing positive.
Our policy is that every reporter does original reporting. Any material published elsewhere must be attributed. Sources are never to be fabricated.
I'm lucky in Tracy to have readers I can rely on to tell me if they think a story is "off" somehow. I get calls when people think they weren't quoted exactly or when we get something wrong. I've asked to see reporters' notes on several occasions. Most of the time, I've found reporters to be honest and careful with their work.
One thing I learned from the Californian's experience is that every reporter should undergo a thorough background check before being hired. It would have been easy to find the lies in Nada Behziz's resume with just a few calls. She said she had a degree from San Francisco State, but she didn't graduate. And her work experience didn't add up, either.
The editors in Bakersfield found out too late that she had a history of lying. What a nightmare.
1 comment:
You wrote: I'm lucky in Tracy to have readers I can rely on to tell me if they think a story is "off" somehow.
As editor you should expect the same treatment when an editorial is off on its facts. It is one thing for an editorial to present a reasoned arguement for or against anything. It is quite another to base that editorial on unproven allegations or some politicians' spin.
I am not going to dissect the inaccuarcies in the Tracy Press editorial. The saynotopombo blog does that quite accurately: http://saynotopombo.blogspot.com
My point is that the Tracy Press accepted the Pombo PR spin that ALL of the opposition comes from environmentalists. That is not the case. The Tracy Press ignored the fact that the NY Times devoted significant space to Pombo's ethical problems. Those are harder to push aside.
By focusing only on the one aspect to this question that could possibly be shown to favor Pombo and ignoring all the rest, the Tracy Press has shown that it needs to examine its own standards for editorial writing.
"Or how can you tell your brother,'Brother, let me remove the speck of chaff that is in your eye,' when you yourself don't see the beam that is in your own eye?"
Posted by: Wes Rolley at November 20, 2005 08:03 AM
I am forced to reluctantly agree with Wes Rolly's comments. While I do not believe such style of reporting is done intentionally, it seems all too often such reporting is done. This is not a problem to the Tracy Press alone but a problem I see in virtually all news media today.
Writers, and I must say I also have this problem, all too often inject their personal biases in seemingly innocent ways, such as depending on trite or cute preconceptions of the topic by their readers and even the elimination of additional facts as a sort of propagation of a lie via the printing of selected items of the truth while eliminating others.
For the most part our local Press does a pretty good job at presenting all of the information; however, there are instances where readers have come away from an article with a notion of the truth that is not factually correct.
In my opinion, it is not the business of any newspaper to steer public sympathies but simply print, as Joe Friday of Dragnet would say, "Just the facts, ma'm." Anything else is social engineering of a public tantamount to propaganda used by governments to control its citizenry.
A totally unbiased and totally free press is absolutely necessary to maintain a free society.
Posted by: Dave Hardesty at November 30, 2005 08:12 AM
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