NEWS FEATURE: Janet Cooke saga puts redemption issue in ethics spotlight

c. 1996 Religion News Service (RNS)-America, as former Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke knows, has always been the land of the second chance. Its hospitality to fresh starts springs from its immigrant heritage and its free-enterprise economic system. It comes partly, too, from religious impulses of forgiveness and redemption. Now comes Cooke asking for a […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(RNS)-America, as former Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke knows, has always been the land of the second chance.

Its hospitality to fresh starts springs from its immigrant heritage and its free-enterprise economic system. It comes partly, too, from religious impulses of forgiveness and redemption.


Now comes Cooke asking for a second chance 15 years after jolting Washington with a spectacular public lie in the most notorious journalistic fraud of our time.

Her public plea for another job in journalism raises ethical questions about punishment, redemption and integrity that touch every life.

And lessons about fate, too.

“One can’t know what’s going to befall you, once you engage in a lie,” said ethicist Sissela Bok, author of the 1989 book, “Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life.” (Random House).

“In a way you lose control. Maybe it’ll come back to haunt you, and maybe it won’t.”

It haunts Cooke.

In the fall of 1980, as a dazzlingly talented 26-year-old reporter at the Washington Post, she told her editors she had found an 8-year-old heroin addict whose short, miserable life illuminated the horrors of Washington’s drug culture.

The Post put “Jimmy’s World” on Page 1. The account shook the city and months later won Cooke a Pulitzer prize.

But in the fresh attention surrounding the prize, discrepancies began to emerge. Cooke belatedly admitted the story was a fiction. The newspaper apologized to its readers and returned the prize; Cooke resigned and disappeared into obscurity.


Her wilderness has been a decade and a half of menial employment. She works in a Kalamazoo, Mich., department store for $6 an hour. She has asthma and no health benefits.

“I’ve lost my voice. I’ve lost half of my life. I’m in a situation where cereal has become a viable dinner choice,” she said in a recent magazine interview that led to appearances on “Nightline” and the “Today” show.

“What I did was wrong,” she told her former boyfriend in the article he wrote for GQ magazine. “I regret that I did it. I was guilty. I did it, and I’m sorry that I did it. I’m ashamed that I did it.”

But, she said, “I don’t think that in this particular case the punishment fits the crime.”

She would like to get back into writing, apparently newspaper writing, somewhere.

And her request poses questions: Is lying, the staining of one’s integrity, a more damaging mistake than, say, committing a crime?

Are the effects of some mistakes, particularly youthful misjudgments, permanent?

Do others at some point have a duty to meet Cooke halfway?

The rules are complicated and cloudy, and American culture offers no consensus.

The average murderer is released after eight years in jail, according to Justice Department figures.


Oliver North lied to Congress under oath and prospers.

Actor Hugh Grant enjoyed a career boost after an encounter with a prostitute. So did the prostitute, for that matter.

But former Columbia University scholar Charles Van Doren, the willing cheat on rigged TV quiz shows, is still smeared in the public memory nearly 40 years after the mistake of his youth.

Nor is ruined televangelist Jimmy Swaggart likely ever to enjoy rivers of cash pouring into his headquarters.

The first distinction in Cooke’s request rises out of its specificity: to re-enter journalism.

Her difficulty is that integrity-personal and institutional-is not merely an element of daily journalism, it is the sea on which it floats. Only trust undergirds the continuing relationship between newspaper and reader, said Jim Amoss, editor of The Times-Picayune in New Orleans.

In that sense an editor’s personal impulse to forgive Cooke is irrelevant in considering whether to hire her. He would not.

“This is not about second chances,” Amoss said.

“I’d look at it through the readers’ eyes,” he said. What would a reasonable reader think encountering an acknowledged liar’s byline?


“I’d think that publication doesn’t deserve my loyalty,” he said. “I would think it’s toying with me.

“It would be like a day-care center hiring a convicted child molester.”

For some, Cooke is forever exiled from professions that rest on a foundation of personal integrity.

“If I were in journalism I wouldn’t touch her with a 10-foot pole. … But I wouldn’t necessarily hold that error against her in some other form of employment so long as there wasn’t the same nature of public trust,” said Arthur Brief, who teaches organizational behavior at Tulane University’s A.B. Freeman School of Business.

“Would you hire her to sell used cars? No problem. To manage a department at Bloomingdales? No qualms, because the level of public trust is different,” Brief said.

Indeed, Brief at first said he would consider hiring Cooke as a stock broker selling investments, until he was reminded that Cooke ultimately was undone by lies that pre-dated “Jimmy’s World”-her falsified resume that got her in the Post’s door in the first place.

“Now I wouldn’t hire her for the brokerage job,” he said. “Now I’m wondering whether this was not just a single mistake, but part of a pattern that might repeat itself.”


Indeed, whether a lie was a single, impulsive mistake or a pattern of conduct is one of the relevant questions people are entitled to ask in considering how to respond to a liar’s request for redemption, said Bok, the writer and ethicist.

There are others, she said: Did it malign or injure others? Was its motive personal greed or raw ambition, or a misguided attempt to do good?

Moreover, people confronting Cooke’s plea are entitled to make another distinction: one between personal and professional rehabilitation.”America is full of people who’ve made some kind of mistake and found a way to reconstitute themselves,” said Bok. “And one would hope that she is afforded a way, and finds a way, to make some kind of new life for herself.

“The question is whether they are entitled to return to a particular job after a betrayal of confidence in that job.

“And that’s a different question.”

MJP END NOLAN

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