Journalistic Integrity

I read the Detroit Free Press most days. I have Mitch Albom set up on this blog because I have admired and respected his work over the past 20 years for the Free Press. I, like thousands of others, read his column last Sunday about the final four game between MSU and North Carolina. I took it as truth, having no reason to suspect or expect it to be any less than that. He has written heart-touching stories in the past. He wrote Tuesdays with Morrie for crying out loud. It was one of the books that changed peoples's lives, mine included, about appreciating truth and how people should treat one another. He branched out into fiction with the bestseller, The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Apparently, the fiction is now carrying over into his sports section column. I feel a sense of betrayal, a betrayal of trust and of a reader's loyalty. First, it was Bob Greene, another one of my favorite newspaper writers, and now Mitch Albom. There have been others in between as well as before and after, but they were writers that I had not heard of or was not a regular reader. It doesn't make the situations any less important, but I didn't take them as personally. The ethics of writing a column or even a web log are such that if you use a resource, it needs to be acknowledged or referenced and if you are writing fiction it needs to be sufficiently indicated either as satire (such as Royko's columns about Slats Grobnik or my own alter ego, Al Bebach) or noted to be fictitious. If Mr. Albom wants to stick with the fiction genre, then it may be best to continue with novels or plays. If he wishes to continue with fact-based sports reporting or human interest stories, then he needs to tell us the truth and not play games with would've, could've, should've happened stories. I have a feeling that this recent faux paux and almost flip apology will not fully cut it among his readers, especially those of us who have been loyal over the years. It takes more than, "I'm sorry. It won't happen again" to regain that sense of trust. Those are basically the same words my five-year-old uses after hitting his sister, but as we know it tends to happen again, anyways. We'll see if he can regain our trust, or if he'll even get the chance once the internal inquiry is over. I hope he does, but I would understand the consequences if he doesn't. He said of Jayson Blair that in the end it is better to write the truth. He needed to remember his own advice.