T A B L E_.T A L K

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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

It's the battle of the Boston Blowhards as a scandal at the Globe raises questions about standards for columnists.

BY PETER CARBONARA

In all of media land can there be any sweeter, cushier gig than that of newspaper columnist? There is no heavy lifting required. While reporters must report -- that is, find out verifiably true things -- columnists need merely opine, and any 4-year-old can do that. In fact not a few small children can do this rather better than, say, A.M. Rosenthal, whose portentous and not infrequently incoherent "On My Mind" column has for years taken up valuable space on the New York Times' op-ed page.

While the Times' corporate stablemate the Boston Globe has no columnist as reliably, satisfyingly bad as Rosenthal, it does have some close contenders, and recently one of them got hers. The fallout has been a series of whiny accusations and hissy fits splashed across the pages of this otherwise tedious broadsheet. It provides an object lesson in journalistic arrogance and the refusal of many in the media biz to be held to the same standards of truthfulness and responsibility they require of everyone else. Last week, Patricia Smith, a poet and a 1998 Pulitzer Prize finalist, agreed to resign after admitting to her editors that four people she had recently written about -- and quoted -- had no existence in the world of objects; that is to say, she made them up.

Smith's creations were the kind of regular-guy characters without which no local columnist's repertory company is complete. Smith conjured up a cancer patient named "Claire," "Jim Burke," who puts up barricades for the Boston Marathon, a cosmetologist named "Janine Byrne" and "Dorothy Gibson," a local mom.

Smith's twice-weekly specialty at the Globe was leaden irony and righteous indignation, usually directed at The Establishment on behalf of women, blacks and poor people. Her tone was unfailingly strident and, true to form, her farewell column last Friday began as a qualified mea culpa but ended as a spirited "fuck you" to her numerous critics. "I will survive this knowing that the heart of my columns was honest and heartfelt," she wrote, and then went on to promise, "I will write as long as I breathe, despite the dire predictions that this indiscretion spells the end of my career."

All this would have been entertaining enough on its own, but on Saturday, the story took an unexpected turn for the even tawdrier when Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law prof and consigliere to celebrity murderers, accused the Globe of employing a double standard. Dredging up a long-forgotten grievance, the ubiquitous mouthpiece faxed a letter to the Globe charging that while Smith, a black woman, had lost her job for doing no worse than quoting imaginary people, her fellow metro columnist, white guy Mike Barnicle, had gone unpunished for making up an obnoxious remark about Asian women and attributing it, back in a 1990 column, to Dershowitz.

N E X T+P A G E | Righteous indignation from Ireland