Jayson Blair for President!

Profoundly shaken by the saga of lies, forgery and editorial incompetence that has rocked the New York Times in recent weeks, wordsmiths the world over have been quivering in their garrets, trembling in their dives, and pissing in their pyjamas.

Together with Britain’s Daily Star, the NYT is the standard-bearer for our profession. When it takes a hit, we all get what its publisher called “a huge black eye”.

But now, duped by 27-year-old staff “reporter” Jayson Blair into publishing several billion column inches of fabricated copy, the NYT has proven itself no better at recognising a con-man than the editors at openDemocracy.

Like Blair, I too have been accused of committing “frequent acts of journalistic fraud”, betraying readers with “sustained deceit and plagiarism”, conducting “phony” interviews, concocting scenes, lifting material from my colleagues, and pretending to have been places and seen people I have never been nor seen. Over the last few minutes, several people have suggested that my work is suggestive of “a troubled young man veering toward professional self-destruction.”

Fortunately for me, most of these accusations have been levelled by you, my fans.

While Jayson Blair’s young career lies in ruins, my own just keeps wowing my pals in the soup kitchen.

The Times called the episode “a low point in the 152-year-old history of the newspaper.” Three weeks after the four-page exposé of the paper’s foibles, Howell Raines, the editor, and Gerald Boyd, the managing editor, resigned their posts.

Somehow, every time I hand in my columns, the editors at openDemocracy get to keep their jobs.

Public trust in journalistic standards is at an all-time low. What better moment to subject a glorious two years of Bread & Circuses to greater scrutiny?

The first column appeared in the innocent days of July 2001 under the title “The World Turned Upside Down”. (Long time fanatics might recall that the column was then known as ‘Mighty Acorns’, a name that was dropped after repeated polling suggested no one knew what the hell it meant.) Some of the claims made in this breakthrough piece now look decidedly fishy.

Although essentially an overt work of imagination involving skilfully drawn characters such as “Mr. Sweatshop”, the column ends by inviting readers to contact someone called “The Green Guru” in somewhere called “Villa Guidice Mondo, Genoa.”

This is a clear case of fabricated reporting.

Any half-wit could tell you that “The Green Guru” lives in Savona, about an hour up the coast from Genoa.

I should be ashamed of myself.

But the falsehoods do not end there.

“Why can’t we be confused?” (9 August 2001) extracts from a speech by a man named “Francois Deluges”, founder of the “French School of Irrational Behaviourism”.

My best Parisian sources tell me that, sadly, no such school of thought exists, and that “Francois Deluges” is simply a product of my French-bashing imagination.

It is hard not to question the validity of the interviews that pepper “Where have all the bookshops gone? Into coffee shops, every one” (23 August 2001). Can there really be a “Max Turdoch”, editor of the magazine “B-List Celebrity Toe-Nail Clippings”?

Unfortunately, these are only the first peccadilloes in a long-running pattern of deceit that continues into the piece you are now reading.

“Con(sumer) Trick” (03 October 2001), includes a “stolen” collection of minutes from an international “Comité Rapprochement” that now appear highly suspect. And if I really splashed out £24,999 on a diamond-encrusted Patek Phillipe watch in a patriotic shopping spree, how come I never claimed for it on expenses?

“If you’re not with us, you’re aghast at us” (23 October 2001) was supposedly written from an underground bunker in which I form “The Citizens Group for Unabated Cowardice in Time of War or Other Breeches of Comfort”. The email address given (cowards@twentyfeetunder.net) in fact does not exist.

The list goes on and on.

Over the next few months, I delivered an orgy of false reporting. From “The Big Sleep” (07 November 2001) to “Oh, what a dovely war!” (21 November 2001), “Remembering the Sixties” (12 December 2001) to “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen (and Lady) (19 December 2001), the claims just get more and more implausible.

The truth is I never hung-out with The Beatles. I don’t recall interviewing Jacob Marley. Me, a private dick? And since when would the US military consider dropping a donut on Afghanistan?

But did my editors care to check the facts? Not a jot! They just accepted whatever junk I sent them, took me at my word, and published it.

Come 2002, things only got worse. “Armageddon out of here” (30 January 2002) references fictitious publications like “Hung Drawn Quarterly” and “Amnesia Review”. Who has ever heard of the “Viennese Institute of Cosmological Paranoia”?

“The House that Jackass Built” (20 February 2002) purports to be wired from “Gafturkeystan”, while “Eponymous Botch” (14 March 2002) is set in “Zimbuctoothed”. Neither nation appears on any map.

Skip a few months and the questionable columns are still flooding in. Did the USA really roll-over the EU in the World Cup finals (“The World Cup Finals, 2002: USA vs. EU” (26 June 2002))? Does Professor N. Ron Buggard run a course at the Texas Business School(“None of your ethical business” (07 August, 2002))? Can it be true that Chancellor Schröder told President Bush to “Make cars, not war!” (“A poisoned pickle” (09 October 2002))?

In “Apathy: the new voting?” (07 November 2002), I talk to “Kenny B. Furreal, head of the United Nations Agency for Apathy, Political Participation and Youth (UNAPPY).” One call to the UN switchboard will tell you no such agency exists.

Several columns later, a new year begins, but the lies keep on coming.

Who is this “Bhagwads Dosh” character who runs the “Spiritual Retreat for the Conflict Fatigued” (“Global crisis, global detox: the magic mountain cure” (09 January 2003))?

My prize-winning investigation into “The Bush-men of Western Texas” (05 February 2oo3) is undermined by my cell phone records of that month, which show several hundred calls emanating from a Caribbean beach.

“Swann Has His Cake, and Eats It”, my “celebrated translation of Proust” (“We’ll Always Have Paris!” (06 March 2003)) is not available in any good bookstores.

The “exclusive” scoops in “Meanwhile, back in the world...” (30 April 2oo3) appear now to have been products of my imagination. High-ranking Brussels sources can’t recall Iran having joined the EU. Chinese officials are adamant that they never covered up Tibet.

I must be stopped! In “Neo-conning the world” (15 May 2003), I claimed to have travelled to Washington in the openDemocracy Sopwith Camel!

How did that one get by my hapless editors?

Eagle-eyed readers who spot any further possible falsehoods should contact haplesseditors@openDemocracy.net.

For the time being, fans can contact me at dominic.hilton@openDemocracy.net.