It's official: you can't always trust a reporter, writes Shane Hegarty
It was a moving interview. The grieving fiancée was packing up her shattered life and leaving a country she felt had betrayed her. "The bitterness in her voice is undisguised," wrote Brian O'Connell about Lisa Milis, whose fiancé, Michael Padden, was one of two gardaí killed in a collision with a stolen car last year.
A month later, "speaking exclusively to Ireland On Sunday", Milis was quoted extensively on how she was returning to Canada, leaving a country that had already "forgotten" the tragedy. "She is not prepared to talk about her relationship with the 27-year-old garda," wrote O'Connell. "The pain of loss is too recent, the grieving process hardly begun. All she feels is anger."
Two weeks later, Ireland On Sunday apologised. "We now accept that Ms Milis never spoke to Mr O'Connell and that she did not give him an interview," it said. "She declined Mr O'Connell's request for an interview as she did with other journalists. We accept that the views attributed to Ms Milis by Mr O'Connell were not hers and in particular that she did not say, as stated in the article, that 'crime-ridden Ireland is beyond hope'." The paper, it said, had made a donation to charity and ended its relationship with O'Connell. It did not mention the misspelling of Milis's name throughout the piece, which referred to her as Ms Nillis.
In the week when the New York Times admitted that Jayson Blair, a young staff reporter, had fabricated stories over several years, Ireland On Sunday refused to comment on how it, too, became a victim. Having been the subject of legal proceedings, it says, its policy is not to discuss the matter. The Irish Times also tried to contact O'Connell, but without success.
It leaves open the question of how it is possible for journalists to file interviews that never happened and from places they have never visited. Blair was unmasked after he plagiarised an interview with a Texan mother whose soldier son was missing in Iraq. Blair described Juanita Anguiano's agony as she waited for news of 24-year-old Edward. How she cried on her porch. Of the knot in her stomach every time the phone rang. Of how her mind wandered to a night 19 years ago when her son fell asleep while hugging her and "at that moment, everything, she said, seemed peaceful and safe".
Blair had neither visited Texas nor met Anguiano. Instead, the 27-year-old had copied an interview in the San Antonio Express-News, continuing a tactic he had used since joining the paper, in 1998. There had been 36 fabrications in his past 73 stories. He would study file photographs to glean details about places he claimed to be visiting. Despite that, one "interview" with the father of POW Jessica Lynch (see left), described non-existent tobacco fields and cattle near the family home. Jessica's sister Brandi told the New York Times the family laughed at that but didn't complain, because "we just figured it was going to be a one-time thing".
John Horgan, professor of journalism at Dublin City University, says: "I'm surprised that it happened to such a degree because of the particular US feature of magazines and newspapers that is fact-checking.
"A journalist will write a story and file it, but that will not be the end of it. It will be handed to a specialist subeditor, who will check the background, interview those who gave quotes. They might spend hours on the phone checking all the facts. That mightn't be so easy to do for daily papers, but I'm still doubly astonished at how much deception there was."
The psychological impact on the US media, which are proud of their ethical standards, is compounded by the fact that the New York Times is the supposed bastion of those ethics. Yet Blair joins a growing list of copycats and fraudsters. As a Washington Post journalist, Janet Cooke won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for a story about "Jimmy", an eight-year-old heroin addict whom she later confessed didn't exist. Five years ago Stephen Glass of New Republic magazine was writing wonderful scoops, including one about the cult that believed George Bush Sr to be a direct descendant of God. None was true. The Blair case has coincided with Glass's launch of his book on the affair, called The Fabulist.
In 2001, the Daily Mirror in Britain paid out £170,000, or almost €250,000, after Matthew Wright, then its showbiz columnist, described The Dead Monkey, a comedy starring David Soul, as "without doubt the worst West End show I have seen" - without having seen it.
The most famous case remains that of Adolf Hitler's diaries, in 1983, when a forger called Konrad Kujau fooled Stern, the German magazine, and then the world's press. When experts announced that the handwriting in the diaries matched other samples of Hitler's script, they did so without realising Kujau had also forged the samples.
We already know that Irish newspapers are not immune. That doesn't make the idea any easier to get used to. "I'm astonished it could happen here," says Prof Horgan, who had not heard of the Ireland On Sunday case. "In a big country where not everyone reads everything, it might be easier to get away with such a thing, but this is such a small country that, even if you haven't read it yourself, sooner or later someone will bring it to your attention."