By Gaia Santoro Lecchini<\/p>\n
In 1980, the acclaimed <\/span>Washington Post<\/span><\/i> published an article titled <\/span>\u201cJimmy\u2019s World,\u201d<\/span><\/a> by Janet Cooke. It spread like wildfire. The story described a third-generation, young, heroin addict. His aspirations were to sell drugs on the District\u2019s \u201cmeanest streets.\u201d There was instant outrage among those who wanted to help this boy \u2013\u2013 yet they couldn\u2019t because the <\/span>Post<\/span><\/i> protected its source.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n But there was <\/span>no source<\/span><\/a> to protect.<\/span><\/p>\n Cooke had created Jimmy and his world. She <\/span>stated<\/span><\/a> in a letter of resignation from the <\/span>Post<\/span><\/i> that her story was \u201cin essence a fabrication.\u201d Once the deception became clear, an onslaught of criticism and hostility from both the public and other newspapers came down on the <\/span>Post<\/span><\/i>. People were horrified that such a significant falsehood could get past a team of well-known editors at the <\/span>Post<\/span><\/i>. <\/span>Times<\/span><\/i> columnist William Safire wrote an essay called <\/span>\u201cBradlee\u2019s World.\u201d<\/span><\/a> He blamed the hoax on Ben Bradlee, a respected executive editor at <\/span>The Washington Post<\/span><\/i> who stuck by Cooke when she was pressured for a source. The scandal went beyond the <\/span>Post<\/span><\/i>, however, moving into the very credibility of journalism as a profession.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n There was once a time where fakery and unchecked journalism was standard. In the nineteenth century, the term \u201cfaking\u201d came to be. To withstand the critiques of \u201cFaking,\u201d journalists argued that the actual stories were not fake, but that the \u201cunimportant details\u201d were made to be more picturesque and therefore interesting. Journalists were not much more than storytellers at the time, their credentials far from anything one might see today. Newspapers paid more for longer stories, leading them to embellish and extend their accounts. Increasing customers\u2019 interest seemed essential not only for the livelihood of the journalists, but the circulation of the newspapers.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cYellow Journalism\u201d followed\u00a0 the age of \u201cfaking.\u201d This era came to be characterized by the sensationalism and exaggeration that grew in newspapers. Headlines got bigger, scandals replaced hard news, and gossip seemed just as good as new research. Newspapers aimed to catch the eyes of readers, and more importantly, customers.<\/span><\/p>\n Yet when the <\/span>Post <\/span><\/i>published \u201cJimmy\u2019s World\u201d the media was in what some called the <\/span>\u201cGolden Age\u201d<\/span><\/a> of journalism, when only politicians seemed to lie \u2013\u2013 before being caught by journalists. Yellow journalism and faking seemed to be gone. The public held the media to high standards and generally trusted it as a \u201cwatchdog\u201d of politics. In well-respected newspapers like <\/span>The Washington Post<\/span><\/i>, the idea of a journalist faking or committing yellow journalism was, as one writer noted, \u201c<\/span>akin to sinning in church.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n That is why the reaction to Cooke\u2019s hoax was so intense. Critics questioned journalism\u2019s ability to relay objective and unfiltered information. The doubt was further exacerbated by the trust the <\/span>Post<\/span><\/i> had garnered from readers over the years, especially its role in the exposure of the Watergate scandal. The public began to <\/span>criticize<\/span><\/a> the role of anonymous sources in news. Some called for tighter regulation on the way reporters wrote their stories was called for.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The idea that there was ever a shared consensus or a <\/span>Golden Age that represented<\/span><\/a> the American people and their truth, is false. Media coverage represented the worries of the white population, specifically middle-aged, white men. It was the era of <\/span>Walter Cronkite<\/span><\/a> \u2013\u2013 an anchorman for CBS whom surveys named as \u201cthe most trusted man in America.\u201d Cronkite was seen as the face of America yet only looked like a small part of it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Despite Cooke being welcomed into the<\/span> Post <\/span><\/i>with enthusiasm due to her impressive credentials, which she misrepresented as well, she was placed into a \u201csecond-tier\u201d of reporting \u2013\u2013 the Weekly \u2013\u2013 and was determined to move up. <\/span>Courtland Milloy<\/span><\/a>, a columnist that worked with Cooke, said: <\/span>\u201cFor all the glamour and prestige that Janet supposedly brought in with her to the <\/span>Post<\/span><\/i> […], with all her credentials, Janet still went straight to the Weekly.\u201d<\/span> In a world of Cronkites, Cooke struggled for a platform as an African American woman. The lack of diversity and the limitations of media\u2019s \u201cconsensus\u201d likely contributed to her thirst for recognition.<\/span><\/p>\n Cooke and her \u201cJimmy\u2019s World\u201d deeply challenged the trust between the public and media. Yet it is worth asking if there was truly ever any trust in the media. If so, from whom? If Americans had indeed trusted the media, marginalized groups were not necessarily included in the trust.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The homogenous, white consensus tended to negatively distort the truth of non-white communities. <\/span>The control white elites had over the representation of marginalized communities in the media vastly impacted the public\u2019s view of those groups. This ranged from coverage consisting heavily of African and Latin Americans in crime news, the misconception of social welfare programs used primarily by people of color, and the use of drugs by these <\/span>communities.<\/span><\/a> It was natural that marginalized groups would distrust the media.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Overall distrust in media has steadily risen since the middle of the twentieth century. The information culture of the twenty-first century echoes the days after Cooke\u2019s story was found to be fake.<\/span> Yet the difference about <\/span>this<\/span><\/i> growth in distrust is its foundation in a primarily white and conservative wing of <\/span>politics<\/span><\/a>. A recent <\/span>Gallup poll<\/span><\/a> shows trust in media to be at an \u201call-time low,\u201d with Republicans polling the lowest. There is a fear on all sides, however, that Americans are living in a world of Janet Cooke\u2019s and \u201cJimmy\u2019s Worlds.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Gaia Santoro Lecchini In 1980, the acclaimed Washington Post published an article titled \u201cJimmy\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3889,"featured_media":193,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[74,72,16],"class_list":["post-192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fake-news","tag-sensationalism","tag-media","tag-fake-news","entry","tgrid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/fys169-f19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/fys169-f19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/fys169-f19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/fys169-f19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3889"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/fys169-f19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/fys169-f19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":195,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/fys169-f19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions\/195"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/fys169-f19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/fys169-f19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/fys169-f19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/fys169-f19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}