I worked for the Wall Street Journal for almost seven years in the 2010’s, producing more than 1,300 columns at a rate of four or five a week. The name of the column was Urban Gardner. It wasn’t a gardening column, even though first-time readers would occasionally ask my advice on growing tomatoes.
It was a pun on my name as well as a double entendre of sorts, since the column, for a section called Greater New York, focused on my peregrinations around the city and pretty much anything else I wanted to write about. It sounds like a dream job and in many ways it was.
But I also lived in fear of being fired. That had nothing to do with the quality of the work or the popularity of the column — I’ve always felt that if your standards for yourself are higher than anybody else’s you’re safe; as long as you’re not a federal employee. Rather, my apprehension concerned my correction rate; the number of occasions when the Journal felt obligated to run a correction in the following day’s paper. It was a peculiar and immortal form of shame because if you look up my stories to this day you’ll find the corrections appended to the bottom of the piece.
Mind you these weren’t major errors that exposed the Wall Street Journal to lawsuits. On one occasion I mistakenly referred to Canada geese as Canadian geese. Were you aware that Canada geese aren’t named after the nation to our north but after ornithologist John Canada? I wasn’t either. I am now and I’ll never forget it.
Another mistake was identifying the dog breed Norfolk terrier as Norwalk terrier, an unforgivable sin in the eyes of the Norwalk terrier community. I’m not trying to evade blame for my mistakes. I plead guilty to being a bad speller as well as someone who, swept up in the drama of story and language, the desire to inform and entertain, doesn’t always review my work with a fine tooth comb. I didn’t average that many corrections. Probably no more than six or seven writing more than two hundred days a year. But when I tried to explain to the Journal’s Standards editor, on my involuntary visits to his office, that they were holding me to the same quota as contributors who may have written for the publication no more than once a month they weren’t having it. They let me know that my error rate was unacceptable and threatened my career.
This is all backstory in light of the Trump administration’s assault on the media, and more basically on the truth. I remember one of President-Elect Trump’s first press conferences in 2016. He liberally seasoned his back and forth with reporters with accusations of “fake news.” It may have been the first time that I’d heard the broadside. Naively, I was shocked and aggrieved. Do journalists make mistakes? Of course they do. But reputable publications quickly correct them. And when they don’t they’re taken to task and sometimes to court.
That’s different than the Trump administration’s modus operandi — exaggerations, distortions and outright lies — and campaign to cow the media by filing frivolous lawsuits that organizations such as ABC and CBS, to their parent companies shame, are paying Trump to drop; in the process inviting more pressure and undermining the sacred trust between them and their readers or listeners by sowing doubt about their work.
The true victim, again, is the truth. Demanding it, insisting upon it, is what distinguishes democracies from dictatorships. Unless we’ve already moved on from that quaint form of government. It’s how we hold our leaders accountable. When Trump blames Volodymyr Zelenskyy for starting the war with Russia he’s doing something worse than parroting Vladimir Putin. He’s telling us that we shouldn’t believe our own eyes and that even our hearts are suspect; apparently under the assumption that if he says it often enough, with a right-wing propaganda apparatus behind him, we’ll eventually capitulate. His ability to sell his own fabrications is perhaps his greatest talent of all.
I once wrote a story for the New York Times about a trend where real estate developers were misnumbering the floors of their buildings to make them sound taller than they were. People I interviewed told me that I really ought to go talk to Donald Trump. So I did. I went to his office, half expecting him to deny doing any such thing. But in typical Trumpian fashion he took credit for the practice. He bragged about it. He considered it a brilliant marketing ploy.
When I started in journalism I wrote mostly for magazines that had entire fact-checking departments that double-checked every statement and quote, often even calling the source to verify that I was citing them accurately. My first experience with being my own fact-checker came with an earlier story that I wrote for the Times. It felt like being an acrobat without a net; even though they had layers of editors that kindly broke your fall well before you hit the ground.
The reason people get into this business in the first place — it’s not for the money — is to have a front row seat on life and to share that as fully and responsibly, if sometimes colorfully, as possible. It’s usually not that hard. The beauty of truth is that it often hits you in the face. It’s lies that suffer from internal flaws. The only way they can flourish is for Americans to suspend disbelief. That’s what happened in the last election and we’re only starting to see the costs. Those suffering from buyers remorse have only themselves to blame.
Ralph Gardner Junior is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found in the Berkshire Eagle and on Substack.
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