Sacto Weekly Asked For Retraction
We received an email from Russell Stein who pointed out his story on IndayBay.org, "Harmon Leon - the Steven [sic] Glass of the Sacramento News & Review?" Big red-alert lights went off at the SFist Fortress of Solitude -- Stephen Glass is (or at least, was) the go-to boogeyman of ethical impropriety in the field of journalism. Harmon Leon is the hilarious dude behind the SF Weekly's "Infiltrator" features (and dropped by SFist for an interview a while back).
It seems that Harmon's piece, "My Dinner At Applebee's With White Supremacists" (linke to in We Read the Weeklies the following Thursday) was retooled for the Sacramento News and Review as "My dinner with the white supremacists" -- a fairly common practice for freelance writers, so that they can get two paychecks for pretty much the same piece. Russell is sympathetic to the needs of a freelance writer, but accuses the News and Review of implying that Harmon wrote the article for them originally, and played with the facts to make it seem like the piece was done in response to the recent flyering of Sacramento neighborhoods by the National Alliance (Warning: racist wing-nuts are hopefully NSFW), when the original piece was written before but published shortly after the flyering took place. After the jump: Harmon, Russell and News and Review Editor Tom Walsh give their sides of the story.
[Ed. Note: At the request of Mark at IndyBay, we've revised the story to reflect that Russell was acting on his own behalf, as IndyBay allows anyone to publish, and therefore Russell was not writing on their behalf.]
Our own reading does reveal that the piece is a little confusing in its timeline. One could get the impression that Harmon did his research on the group after the fliering was done, but instead, Harmon did the research for the first published piece in the Weekly and then probably did some more research for the other piece to freshen the content and add a local angle. For instance, here's the subhead:
Members of a racist organization peppered Sacramento neighborhoods with white-power pamphlets proclaiming love of their race. Our writer goes undercover in order to find out why they hate other races.
Points of interest: "Our writer" makes it seem as though Harmon is part of the News and Review staff. And "goes," in the present tense, confuses the timeline -- "went" would have been more appropriate, since the actual udercover investigation happened in January. News and Review editor Tom Walsh confirmed that Harmon didn't write the subhead, so he's off the hook for that at least.
The story opens with a scene from the original piece, where one white supremacist wishes a tsunami upon Mexico. In the next section, "It’s a cultural group!" it picks up from the point of the flyering with new reporting. Twice he mentions going to the website, first to describe a conversation among the members about the Sacramento Bee coverage, next to post some racist capsule reviews (the latter, of course, could have been done well before the flyering incident). The real confusion lies in the next section, "So many hate groups, so little time:"
Who are the faces behind the recent fliers? The fliering work was done, faceless, in the middle of the night while the entire city was asleep. (That aspect is not very cultural-pride-ful!) The article in the Bee said an attempt to reach the group for comment was not successful.After going to the group’s Web site, which rails on about “the Negroid filth churned out by MTV and the other Jewish promoters of anti-White music intended to demoralize, corrupt and deracinate young Whites,” I e-mail the group about its next Sacramento-area meeting.
A week later, eerily sitting in my in-box is an e-mail: “We should have our next meeting coming up mid to late January. I would like to meet with you in person before then.”
So it could seem as though Harmon was following up on the Sacramento Bee story -- trying to reach the National Alliance for comment after the Bee reporter couldn't. But Harmon got in touch with the group long before the flyering -- and in fact was invited to participate, according to the piece in the Weekly. After this, the piece basically becomes an edited-down version of the original. According to Harmon:
It's a Sacramento paper, thus the editor requests a Sacramento angle and jumping off point for the piece. The other section (Applebee's) is basically a 6,800 word story edited down to roughly 2,400, with the editorial direction to have more focus on the group and less focus on me and my schtick. The segues between the two sections did not [imply] that one was the cause of the other. Logistically that would not make sense, being I said in the story I contacted the group in January and the flier drive was in Feb.
An interesting side note is that in the original Weekly piece, Harmon chose not to name the group in question because he didn't want them to garner the publicity and, "I also was very paranoid about mentioning the group's name, being I didn't want to be on the hate group's radar (which I ended up being on through hoards of Jew-hating email)." He says he had a number of long discussions with editor Tom Walsh, who confirmed to us that it was his idea as editor to name names. As Harmon points out, "the kimono was already open story-wise."
We'll argue that the segue doesn't state that the meeting at Applebee's was in response to the fliers, but it certainly doesn't make it particularly clear. Something like, "Having been to the website" would have helped. Other verb-tense issues abound, especially at the end: "I’m given a handwritten address for the next meeting, which is going to be at a German restaurant on Watt Avenue." The story also would have been stronger if the part where Harmon was invited to participate in the flyering was included -- after all, he did know about it beforehand.
A reader could easily be confused unless they read it very closely. Still, a confusing segue and bad proofing for verb tense does not make for "perpetrating journalistic fraud" in our book. Russell wrote us to say "I emailed the SN&R editor and from his replies I'm pretty sure they're going to have to retract it. Right now this Harmon Leon dude is supposedly out of state and the SN&R is 'going to get back to me next week' after they talk to Leon." Harmon confirmed to us that he was covering the Minutemen Project on the Mexican border last week. But after we contacted Tom Walsh, he declared "No retraction will be issued. The facts in the story are correct." We hope that everyone can come to a mutual understanding on this, but we're not opimtistic. In the meantime, we can't wait for the white supremacists to find us and leave comments! Won't that be fun!