The Case of Janet Cooke

When “Jimmy’s World,” the story of an eight-year-old heroin addict, appeared on the front page of the Washington Post last September, it created quite a stir in the city. According to Janet Cooke, the young black woman who reported the story, “Jimmy” (a pseudonym) had been on heroin since the age of five, when he’d been introduced to the stuff by his mother’s boyfriend, “Ron.” Jimmy and his Mom lived in Ron’s house, a “shooting gallery” where junkies came regularly to buy and use heroin. Besides being an addict, Jimmy was a truant from school and spoke in a lingo (“Don’t nobody here hardly ever smoke no herb”) that would put Superfly to shame.

The local government reacted to this grisly tale by launching an intensive search for the child. When schools, social-welfare services, and police all failed to unearth any trace of him, the authorities requested that the Post reveal Jimmy’s whereabouts.

The Post refused. There was, first of all, Miss Cooke’s personal safety to consider: it seems that Ron had threatened to come after her with a knife at the first sign of police interest in him. So terrifying was this prospect that Miss Cooke had felt constrained to keep the true identity of her sources secret even from her immediate superiors. Then, of course, the Post recognized a First Amendment issue when it saw one. Where soldiers and statesmen had failed in their efforts to abridge the constitutional guarantees of freedom of the press, was a mere child to be permitted to open a breach in the wall? When the mayor and police chief threatened to subpoena Miss Cooke’s notes, Post staffers professed themselves ready to face jail sooner than capitulate to the pressure.

Luck was with the Post; after nearly three weeks’ fruitless search, the mayor seemed inclined to let the matter fizzle and announced that in any case he had heard the story was only “part myth, part reality.” But the Post itself went on looking. The paper sent eleven reporters into the “inner city” to find Jimmy—to get him some help, but also on the premise that there must be dozens more Jimmies out there, and thus presumably dozens more stories.

This crack Post team—which included Janet Cooke herself—failed as thoroughly as had the municipal authorities. When Miss Cooke was asked by a colleague to point out Ron’s house, she was unable to do so. When, shortly thereafter, she was ordered to set up a meeting between Jimmy and her editor, she agreed, only to report back that the family had moved away.

Doubts about the veracity of Miss Cooke’s story began to flicker in the mind of Milton Coleman, Post city editor and Miss Cooke’s direct boss. Coleman himself had been privy to, and had dismissed, the suspicions of others on the Post staff. Thus, a reporter who had accompanied Miss Cooke on the search for other Jimmies described to Coleman her obvious unfamiliarity with the neighborhood and her inability to point out Jimmy’s house, and voiced some misgivings about the story; Coleman put these down to professional jealousy. The editor of another section of the paper, where Miss Cooke had worked for a year and a half until her promotion to the city desk, revealed to Coleman after the story was published that she had had problems with Janet’s stretching or distorting of the truth; Coleman shrugged this off as an editor’s irritation at losing a reporter to another division. But when, three weeks after the story was published, Miss Cooke was unable to produce her star witness for Coleman, and offered the flimsy excuse that the family had suddenly moved to Baltimore, Coleman’s faith was shaken.

But not shaken enough, apparently, to make Coleman think twice before recommending “Jimmy’s World” for a Pulitzer prize nomination—and for four other awards as well—more than a month after the family’s disappearing act. Nor did doubts about Jimmy’s existence disturb Coleman’s own boss, Bob Woodward (of Watergate fame). The misgivings of Miss Cooke’s colleagues were ascribed by Woodward, as by Coleman, to professional jealousy. Criticism from outside the Post served only to send Woodward into what he described as his “Watergate mode: protect the source and back the reporter.” In fact, questions raised by the mayor and police chief hardened Woodward’s resolve to see Miss Cooke’s story nominated for the Pulitzer. His approach, he later explained, was “in for a dime, in for a dollar”: not to have backed the nomination would have been tantamount to an admission that the paper had published a questionable report. Woodward duly convinced his bosses to nominate the story, and “Jimmy’s World” was sent to the Pulitzer committee as an entrant in the local news category.

In the event, the judges honored another story in that category, but decided to reconsider Miss Cooke’s under a different rubric—feature writing; in doing so they bypassed the jury that normally screens entries (this is not an unheard of action, though it is highly unpopular with Pulitzer juries). When one member of the board dismissed Jimmy as an “aberration,” Roger Wilkins, an editorialist for the Washington Star, undertook to respond—as the only black and the only Washingtonian present. Wilkins explained that while many Washington blacks were skeptical of the story’s accuracy, he himself believed it to be true and thought it an important piece of work, because too many whites were ignorant of and indifferent to the disastrous effects of drugs in the black community. Wilkins asserted, moreover, on the basis of his own experience as an urban-affairs reporter, that he could find eight-year-old junkies within a ten-block radius of the board’s meeting place on New York’s Upper West Side. When the vote came, it was unanimous (with one abstention); the Pulitzer prize for feature writing was awarded to “Jimmy’s World.”

The Post management was jubilant. The bestowal of journalism’s most coveted award helped to still the rumblings of doubt in the newsroom, and the Jimmy episode seemed destined to fade quietly away.

Nobody counted on Janet Cooke—who had, it soon turned out, been less than entirely honest about her past when seeking work at the Washington Post. Not content with her own achievements in life, she had embroidered her résumé, claiming a B.A. (magna cum laude) from Vassar, an M.A. from the University of Toledo, and fluency in several languages. When the time came to provide a curriculum vitae for the Pulitzer committee, to be published if she won, she added a year at the Sorbonne and a couple of more languages for good measure. The release of Miss Cooke’s autobiography was the beginning of the end for little Jimmy.

Staffers at the Toledo, Ohio, Blade, where Miss Cooke had worked before going to the Post, noticed discrepancies between their own records and the version of Miss Cooke’s life published by the Associated Press. Further checking by the AP and the Blade revealed that Miss Cooke had attended Vassar for one year, and that she had not an M.A. but only a B.A. from the University of Toledo. Calls from the AP and Vassar began coming in to the Post. Ben Bradlee, executive editor, and his staff realized that if Janet Cooke’s word was all that stood between “Jimmy’s World” and disgrace, the fortress was poorly defended indeed. The time had finally come to check out the story.

Accordingly, they sat Miss Cooke down and grilled her. The first stage in the process began in a bar, where Milton Coleman and Miss Cooke each drank a ginger ale. She eventually admitted that she had had to leave Vassar for emotional reasons after her first year but stuck to her guns on everything else. The interrogation continued in the Post offices. During the course of it Bradlee accused Miss Cooke of being like Richard Nixon, and Woodward swore he would prove the Jimmy story false if it was the last thing he ever did. It ended after many hours when Miss Cooke admitted that not only her resume but also her story was false.

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The next day the Post announced it had discovered that the story was a “hoax” and requested that the Pulitzer be withdrawn. The prize was handed over to the runner-up; Janet Cooke resigned, with apologies “to my newspaper, my profession, the Pulitzer board, and all seekers of the truth”; and the Washington Post went about the business of trying to salvage some of its credibility.

That process began with an editorial asserting that “We Apologize.” Actually, far from apologizing, the column threw up its hands at the enormity of Janet Cooke’s lies, comparing her first to a bank embezzler and then to “some giant weapons system that can come in under the radar.” The reading public, however, could take heart from the thought that small lies and distortions were less likely to appear in print than total fabrications; for though the editorial process had been unable to deal with “the sheer magnitude and breathtaking gall of [Miss Cooke’s] deception,” it had no problem with “far less spectacular but more commonplace slides and lapses.” Nor, the Post opined, should “students and critics of the press” turn their back on the Constitution simply because Miss Cooke (and the Post, in all innocence) had used it to protect her deception: “constitutional values,” the editorial intoned, “are no less vital today than they were before.” The editorial ended by assuring readers that “more of the skepticism and heat that our colleagues traditionally bring to bear on the outside world will now be trained on our own interior workings.”

The Post‘s first attempt at such internal “skepticism and heat” took the form of a 12,000-word report on the episode, written by Post “ombudsman” Bill Green and published the Sunday after the Pulitzer prize was withdrawn. (My reconstruction of the Janet Cooke episode is largely drawn from the facts provided in the report.) Green, who stressed that he was “invited,” not ordered, by Bradlee to prepare the report, promised to answer the questions, “How did it all happen? Why?”

Perhaps the most striking feature of Green’s reconstruction is his own eye for detail. He informs us, for example, that “Milton Coleman is a rangy, tall man… . He pursues news as though it’s his quarry… . He likes to work in a vest.” Janet Cooke, he reveals, first wrote to Ben Bradlee about a job on July 12, 1979, “eleven days before her twenty-fifth birthday.” Bob Woodward is “tough, determined, persistent” and “frequently the first of the Post‘s top staff in the office in the morning and among the last to leave at night.” Ben Bradlee, Green enthuses restrainedly, is “luminescent.” (Bradlee’s luminescence did not prevent him from living in blissful ignorance of the tidewater of chaos rising around him, apparently unaware that police, welfare workers, and even eleven of his own reporters were out scouring the town for the elusive Jimmy.)

Miss Cooke herself, according to Green, was “striking, smartly dressed, articulate… . And she could write.” Her writing, indeed, was so impressive that “the usual check of references was done in a cursory manner” before she was hired to work on one of the Post‘s local weekly sections. During her year and a half on the weekly, in the words of Vivian Aplin-Brownlee, her editor there, Miss Cooke displayed a tendency to write “further than the truth would allow. When challenged on facts … Janet would reverse herself, but without dismay or consternation.” Despite this small peccadillo, Miss Cooke’s byline appeared fifty-two times before she moved on to the Jimmy story and promotion to the Post‘s daily metropolitan edition.

On the issue of Miss Cooke’s lack of respect for facts, Miss Aplin-Brownlee remembers that “I had been tough on Janet. She knew it and I knew it,” One person who did not know it, on the evidence of his actions at least, was Milton Coleman: he gave Miss Cooke, a relatively green reporter whom everyone knew to be unfamiliar with “the streets,” a virtually free hand in the Jimmy story. Neither Coleman nor any other editor ever requested a source for Jimmy from Miss Cooke. On the contrary, they made it quite clear from the outset that they would not make any such request.

Green’s report is tediously complete on the how of it all: Miss Cooke’s bosses simply chose to take her word on the Jimmy story as they had chosen to take her word on her own background. After publication, when questions arose within the paper as well as outside, the editors simply chose again: to dismiss internal skepticism as envy and to regard the public outcry as interference with constitutional protections of freedom of the press. When the Pultizer nomination came up, they chose yet again, this time to behave as if the story were rock-solid and to go ahead with the nomination.

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That the rules of the profession were suspended where Miss Cooke was concerned is thus perfectly clear. That they were suspended not only in relation to “Jimmy’s World” but in relation to Miss Cooke’s entire career at the Post is equally obvious. Where Green’s report fails is in providing any reasonable explanation as to why Miss Cooke merited such special treatment.

Green does give a half-hearted try. He dwells, for example, on Miss Cooke’s personal panache: “When she walked, she pranced. When she smiled, she dazzled.” He speaks poetically of the trust that must inform relations between editor and reporter: “The jugular of journalism lay exposed—the faith an editor has to place in a reporter.” Green even touches on the role of affirmative action, only to dismiss it: “Did race,” he asks, “have anything to do with Miss Cooke’s ascendancy? … There’s some yes and some I-don’t-know in any honest answer.” Green himself opts for neither yes nor I-don’t-know. “Race may,” he concludes, “have played some role, but professional pride and human decency were deeply involved in this story and that has not a diddle to do with race.”

Alexander Cockburn, media “critic” of the Village Voice, and one who no doubt possesses more solid radical credentials than Green, finds a stronger connection between Janet Cooke’s “problem” and her race. In fact, in his column on the subject, he pronounces it no wonder that Miss Cooke, being black, “felt she had to play harder and faster” in the Post‘s highly competitive atmosphere.

Roger Wilkins, in his own editorial on the Cooke case, is not so quick as Cockburn to excuse Miss Cooke. Wilkins, indeed, implies that Miss Cooke is something of a discredit to her race. “The greatest injury Miss Cooke has done,” he believes, is to her fellow black journalists who “struggle … every day” against “white editors who doubt our perceptions, our judgment, and our ability to be fair and accurate.”

But one cannot help feeling that Wilkins might have chosen a more felicitous context for this portrait of the black man’s burden in the white world of journalism. In relation to Miss Cooke, whose work suffered from an excess of trust on the part of her editors, black and white, the notion that blacks are at a disadvantage in the newsroom is simply fantastic.

Equally untenable is Cockburn’s view that Janet Cooke had to “play harder and faster.” For she quite unmistakably did nothing of the kind. On the contrary, Miss Cooke consistently took the reporter’s easy way out: she invented things. She had learned, from her experience at the Post and for all one knows at the Toledo Blade as well, that far from needing to play hard and fast, she could play fast and loose with the truth and get away with it.

No less inconsistent with the facts of the case is Bill Green’s contention that the Janet Cooke story had less to do with race than with “professional pride” and “human decency.” Does the Post‘s arrogant dismissal of doubts about a story it had published constitute evidence of professional pride? Was the paper’s determination to “protect” an eight-year-old heroin addict from police and welfare workers a manifestation of human decency?

Green’s analysis of events, like Cockburn’s and Wilkins’s, conflicts not only with what we know of Janet Cooke and her career, but also with what we know of the professional working world. In that world today, the principles of affirmative action—that blacks must be hired, treated, and promoted preferentially—are accepted as a matter of course. And nowhere is this more the case than in the news business.

Having recently spent nearly a decade with a major news organization, I can testify to the widespread and entrenched nature of this phenomenon. “We really need more blacks” was a frequent refrain where I worked, as if black employees were a necessary staple, like typewriter ribbons or telex machines. And keeping the supply at the proper level often entailed rather creative hiring and firing decisions; one black employee, for example, whose work merited summary dismissal, could not be fired until another black had been found to fill the void—a process that took months.

Among my colleagues, both black and white, instances of particular preferential treatment engendered a certain amount of cynicism and even quiet jeering, but there was never any move to reject the policies from which such treatment arose. Rather, there was a general and entirely open consensus that the policies were only proper, only just. Moreover, that these policies implied the institution of numerical racial quotas was understood—except, perhaps, by some beneficiaries of these quotas. I will always remember the shock of one young black colleague of mine, a true believer in “reparational” hiring programs, when he learned that there was a quota system in our office and that he himself, however well-qualified, constituted one of its statistics.

What was left unexpressed in all this—and would have been denied in any case—was the feeling that implementing preferential hiring policies inevitably required some lowering of standards. Thus, for example, one black writer whose work consistently needed heavy editing was touted as “a fine little writer.” This writer, quite well-educated and not inarticulate, suffered from the terror and paralysis that sometimes afflict people in the face of a blank sheet of paper. The editors, however, having accepted along with the technicalities of affirmative action its underlying assumption that blacks cannot succeed on their own merits, clearly would have regarded any admission that this “fine” writer was in fact no writer at all as a subtle expression of racism. In their eyes—and it must be remembered that such people, for the most part, come from a class where acquaintanceship with blacks is limited to the household help—a black employee who was well-spoken and decorous was about the best to be hoped for. Under the circumstances, a chic and attractive Vassar graduate must have seemed to the Washington Post too good to pass up.

Given the realities of affirmative action, it is patently obvious that Miss Cooke was hired quickly and easily because she was black, and a woman to boot: the film critic Judith Crist, who was on the screening jury that never screened “Jimmy’s World” for the Pulitzer board, has described Miss Cooke as a “twofer,” a candidate who meets both racial and sexual requirements. It should be no less obvious that her career was fostered and promoted, despite her “problem” with truth-stretching, because she was black. In this regard the letter she received from the publisher of the Post, Donald Graham, after the appearance of “Jimmy’s World,” is quite explicit: “The Post,” he wrote, “has no more important or tougher job than explaining life in the black community in Washington. A special burden gets put on black reporters doing that job… . You belong very high up among them.” And it seems equally clear that Miss Cooke won her Pulitzer because she was black; “we really,” one can almost hear the internal machinery clacking at the board meeting, “need a black.”

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Race, then, undeniably played a large and significant role in what Bill Green describes as Janet Cooke’s “ascendancy” at the Washington Post, and the role it played was entirely different from the one suggested by Alexander Cockburn and other apologists. But there are other elements in the episode that must be given consideration as well.

Miss Cooke herself, first of all, must be held accountable for her own dishonesty; and the Post must be held accountable for rewarding and promoting that dishonesty. If Miss Cooke had the good fortune to live in a world that granted her special privileges as a black and as a woman, she also found herself in a profession that provided fertile ground for her “creative” talents. The debacle of “Jimmy’s World” was, in short, the child not only of affirmative action but of a phenomenon that might be called newsman’s disease.

Like other diseases, this affliction arises from a disruption of the natural order of things. Reporters have traditionally seen their proper function as one of sniffing out facts, but more and more these days they have come to regard themselves, instead, in a grander light, as bloodhounds of the “truth.” Whereas a sniffer-out of facts might be thought to bear a special obligation to provide those facts complete and uncolored by his own opinions, many journalists, including many I have known personally, feel no such obligation, but rather seem to consider themselves endowed with some sort of special gift for knowing the truth. The duty to be objective has been transmuted into the certainty of omniscience.

One manifestation of the sickness is a contempt for the intelligence and good sense of ordinary people. The audience for news is considered chronically short on information and long on prejudice. If, for example, people should choose to vote in large numbers for Ronald Reagan, they are regarded as having done so not on the basis of rational thought and conscious decision but in ignorance of or in callous indifference to the “truth” about Reagan, a truth which on inspection turns out usually to correspond to the political opinions generally approved within the news community.

Another symptom of the disease is the routine imputation of base motives to almost anyone, however well-educated or thoughtful, whose view of the world differs from that propounded in the news community. Such differences are often ascribed to ulterior purposes that must be unsavory, especially if they are linked to demands that the news community be called to account for its own practices and in-built biases. To complete the circle, such demands are considered nothing but a disguised intention to interfere with the news community’s precious right to dominion over the truth.¹

Thus it was that when the editors of the Washington Post heard doubts about Janet Cooke’s work, even those expressed by her own peers, they automatically dismissed them as being of venal origins. These editors operated under the serene assurance that their role as keepers of the flame of truth entitled them to behavior which in any other profession they themselves would have decried as corruption. In their arrogance, they decided to publish a wholly anonymous and undocumented story, then slipped into the “Watergate mode” of denouncing questions about it as unwarranted and illegal interference, and then promoted the story for an award as if no doubts had ever existed.

It was this same sort of arrogance that clearly led Michael Daly of the New York Daily News to believe he could get away with inventing an eyewitness to describe to him events in Northern Ireland. And it no doubt also prompted Teresa Carpenter of the Village Voice to feel she had the right to present secondhand quotations from the assassin of Allard Lowenstein as the product of a personal interview (in a story, incidentally, that won her the Pulitzer forfeited by Janet Cooke).

Does it seem too much to ask that reporters get back to the business of uncovering the facts and leave the rest of us to muddle through to the truth in our own blind, groping way?

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As for Janet Cooke, while “Jimmy’s World” clearly spells the end of her newspaper career, the episode could open up new vistas of opportunity for her. She might, after a decent interval, find herself once again in the limelight, a kind of negative celebrity à la Clifford Irving; there is even some talk of a book contract. We may, in short, soon be privy to the “inside story” of the Janet Cooke case.

The real implications of that case, meanwhile, seem likely to meet only with more of the rejection and denial evinced by Green, Cockburn, Wilkins, and the rest. They will carry on, unshaken in the conviction that their profession places them above suspicion. And they will, it appears, go on totting up the racial balance sheet, heedless of the deleterious effects of such calculations on the community in general, and on the self-respect and reputation of their black colleagues in particular.

¹ For an examination of this syndrome from within, see Joseph Kraft’s “The Imperial Media” in the May COMMENTARY.