FIRST THE NEW YORK TIMES, THEN THE BBC -- now Reuters looks to have been caught making things up:
This is from a story that Reuters news service ran this week with my byline:
"Jessica Lynch, the wounded Army private whose ordeal in Iraq was hyped into a media fiction of U.S. heroism, was set for an emotional homecoming on Tuesday . . . Media critics say the TV cameras will not show the return of an injured soldier so much as a reality-TV drama co-produced by U.S. government propaganda and credulous reporters."
Got problems with that?
I do, especially since I didn't write it.
Isn't "byline fraud" at least as bad as Jayson Blair's "dateline fraud?" But there's more Blair-like scandal:
I understand that news wire services often edit, add, remove or write new leads for stories. What amazed me was that a story could have my byline on it when I contributed only a few sentences at the end -- and in later versions I didn't contribute anything at all.
The stories contained apparently fresh material attributed to sources I did not interview.
Reuters should be ashamed. Experience suggests, however, that it won't be.
