The Washington Post returns a prize, with apologies
It was every young reporter's dream come true: a gripping Page One story in the Washington Post, a public outcry, an investigation by the city and, finally, the Pulitzer Prize. For a glorious Monday last week, Janet Cooke, 26, hit the jackpot. Her sensational account of "Jimmy," an eight-year-old heroin addict, had won the Pulitzer for feature writing, and she seemed destined for stardom at one of the nation's most respected newspapers.
But the fairy tale began to unravel Tuesday afternoon, when Post Executive Editor Benjamin Bradlee received a phone call from Vassar College. Cooke, he was told, had not graduated from Vassar, as she had claimed in the biography submitted to the Pulitzer judges. At about the same time, Managing Editor Howard Simons learned from the Associated Press that Cooke had not received a master's degree from the University of Toledo, as she had also claimed. Questioned by her editors, Cooke admitted that she had exaggerated her credentials (she had attended Vassar for one year and earned a B.A. from Toledo). Nearly eleven hours later, after more grilling and a fruitless search for Jimmy's house in southeast Washington, Cooke admitted that the boy did not exist and that she had invented most of the story. Cooke resigned and went into seclusion. The Post promptly returned the award and apologized in an editorial: "This newspaper . . . was itself the victim of a hoax—which we then passed along in a prominent page-one story . . . How could this have happened?"
How, indeed, could a responsible newspaper be duped into publishing fiction as fact? As it turned out, the Post's main failing was having absolute faith in its reporter. This might be considered a virtue ordinarily, but the circumstances surrounding the publication of "Jimmy's World" were anything but ordinary. Though bright and ambitious, Cooke was rather inexperienced for such a sensitive story, having worked only 2½ years at the Toledo Blade and nine months at the Post. In "Jimmy's World," she described how a black youngster was given heroin injections by a drug dealer as his mother looked on. Cooke had earned the assignment by writing what one editor described as a "brilliant" story on 14th Street, N.W., which is in a Washington section known for its pushers and hookers. The article on Jimmy was reported during several weeks last fall and was approved by Metropolitan Editor Bob Woodward, who helped win a Pulitzer for the Post with his Watergate reporting. When "Jimmy's World" appeared, many Post reporters were incredulous. Most suspicious were Cooke's fellow blacks, who felt that her depiction of ghetto life rang false.
The Post usually insists that reporters tell editors the names of sources, but exceptions are made, most notably with Deep Throat, Woodward's key informant on Watergate. In this case, the editors made an exception because Cooke said Jimmy's drug supplier had threatened to kill her if she revealed her sources, even to them. Says Woodward: "You have to build a chain of trust with your reporters. If you attempt to re-report stories, you erect a barrier. I was sympathetic."