He traveled the world. He had the ears of the powerful, but he never lost the common touch. His analysis was insightful, yet accessible to those with the reading skills or IQs of a nine year-old. He was well groomed. He was a perfect journalist, except for one thing.
It was all lies.
“This is Sunday Reports, with host Wendy Miserly.”
Less than 24 hours ago, The Irrational‘s rising young star Bryson Pecobia resigned from the news show amid allegations that 17 of his stories had been either plagiarized or completely fabricated.
In one now infamous example, a Pecobia report on infighting at the United Nations featured six minutes of footage of Foster Hewitt doing play-by-play announcing of a Leafs-Canadiens hockey game originally played in 1971. “You got something against Foster Hewitt?” Pecobia defended himself in an exclusive interview with Sunday Reports. “Don’t say anything bad about Foster Hewitt – he made this country what it is today!” Pecobia did allow, however, that if he hadn’t been under deadline pressure, he would have chosen a more exciting game.
To cite another example, in a report on the war on Iraq filed last month, Pecobia was found by producers at The Irrational to have quoted 17 consecutive paragraphs of Homer’s The Iliad without attribution. (Actually, it was 19 paragraphs, but this is a minor quibble.) Pecobia apologized, claiming that he honestly thought that the material was original. Despite this breach of journalistic ethics, MotherCorp executives and senior producers at The Irrational stood by Pecobia, who, they argued, had proven himself to be an enterprising and well groomed journalist.
It’s not that segment producers at the show were not made aware of the problems with Pecobia’s reporting. In one case, a viewer wrote to complain about 137 errors in a 30 second report on the Shaw Festival. These ranged from a supered title that called it the Pshaw Festival (with no ironic intent), a background that was actually looped footage of the Zapruder film and Pecobia claiming that Ontario’s theatre festival was an important tourist attraction in Beirut.
“Well, that’s just nitpicking,” Pecobia defended himself at the time. Apparently, producer Rose Blumenthal agreed. Pecobia was docked a week’s pay and told to take a high school remedial geography course. There is no record of whether or not he actually did.
Another example of Pecobia’s fabrications being brought to the attention of the show’s producers but not resulting in meaningful corrective action came as a result of perhaps his most famous news item: Mother X. This told the tale of Alice, a one-legged, crack addicted single mother who worked as a prostitute so she could afford the trailer she lived in with her 12 children, and who sold her eggs over the Internet to infertile couples in order to pay for pablum for her six month old triplets. The week long series was nominated for several of Canada’s most prestigious journalism awards.
A few days after it first aired, a woman claiming to be Alice started calling producer Sidney Brumenthal to complain about inaccuracies in the series. The woman claimed that she was actually an able-bodied mother of three who lived in a comfortable home in Scarborough with her husband, and that her only addiction was to The Antiques Road Show. She added that she thought Pecobia was interviewing her for a story on public funding for private schools, and that she was mortified when friends and family gathered around her television set to watch her TV debut.
Pecobia argued that Alice was suffering from a delusion fed by her crack addiction, and that, anyway, everybody knows that poor people don’t like admitting they’re poor. However, Brumenthal had doubts about the series: who would volunteer the information that they were addicted to The Antiques Roadshow if they didn’t have to? A follow-up interview proved that Alice’s claims were basically correct.
As punishment, Pecobia received a sternly worded memo about following network journalistic ethics policies and was benched for The Irrational‘s next three intra-network softball games. (He was actually supposed to be benched for six games, but when The Irrational was beaten by a team from a puppet show, the punishment was lightened to save The Irrational from further embarrassment.)
Not all of Pecobia’s errors were so obvious. In light of the problems that had been brought to their attention, senior producers at MotherCorp took a second look at all of the items he had written, finding problems with at least 57. In one item, he called Peoria “Pea Soup, Illinois.” In another, he referred to Queen Elizabeth as “the sovereign ruler of the Lower Antilles, and a woman who gives a mean foot massage.” He also misidentified Jian Ghomeshi as the king of Spain.
Some people have started asking if Pecobia would not have gotten away with his fabrications for so long if he wasn’t white. Would he have been stopped much sooner if he hadn’t been part of The Irrational‘s cozy Caucasian corporate culture?
Well, actually, nobody in journalism ever asks questions like that. But, if anybody did, Blue Rosenthal, head of public affairs programming at MotherCorp, would have had a ready response: “Everybody loves a suck up. It doesn’t matter what colour a writer is…if he sucks up to an editor, the editor is likely to cut him a lot of slack.”
This is supposed to be reassuring.
Rumours that the producers who didn’t hold Pecobia to the programme’s standards face disciplinary action have engendered a quick response from Mother Corporation. “There will be no witch hunts here,” Rosenthal claimed. He could not explain, however, the internal memo that asked all employees to collect wood chips and small pieces of flammable material and deposit them with his secretary.
Pundits have begun to wonder if the crisis at such a prestigious show as The Irrational might seriously damage the credibility of journalism. They needn’t worry. Checkbook journalism and naked servility to power had already pretty much destroyed the reputation of newsgathering institutions long before the problems with 139 reports by Bryson Pecobia were uncovered.
For Sunday Reports, this is Wendy Miserly.