This was initially published in the Editor’s Blog. We are republishing it here, where the piece in question first appeared.
As you can see in this update here, The Intercept announced this afternoon that it had “discovered a pattern of deception in the actions of a staff member” named Juan Thompson. They further said that Thompson had “gone to great lengths” to produce fake stories. For anyone who has seen these fabulism controversies erupt it is a familiar set of alleged infractions: fabricated quotes, fake email accounts, sources who can’t remember speaking to reporters, quotes that may be valid but can’t be verified. The Intercept made a series of corrections and editor’s notes tied to the affected pieces, including retracting one piece entirely.
Last summer, in our since-discontinued section The Slice, TPM published a freelance story by Thompson, then still a staffer at The Intercept, on the role of criminal violence in his own family. The piece was aggressively fact-checked. I know this because I was peripherally involved in the process at the time. And this has been confirmed this afternoon by a further review of emails, notes and discussions with relevant TPM staffers.
Any editor in such a position wants to go back and find that the people who work for him or her asked all the right questions, pressed the right uncertainties and so forth. That’s what we found.
However, this was at heart a personal essay. While various facts could be independently verified, the great bulk of the story rests on the author’s immediate personal experiences – incidents, conversations, memories, etc. which simply cannot be independently verified. One of the dirty little secrets of fact-checking is that it is quite difficult to uncover a determined effort to deceive. The process is most effective at uncovering sloppiness, missed questions or short-cuts done in good faith by a reporter with the right intentions. To uncover fraud you go on reputation, personal interactions and looking for that detail or claim that just doesn’t fit.
With all this said, we have no reason to believe – apart from the revelations published today by The Intercept – that there are falsehoods contained in the Thompson piece we published. However, particularly with a personal essay, the integrity of the piece rests inevitably on the good faith of the writer – a fundamental trust that he or she is being straight with us as editors and you as readers. While we do not and are in no position to make accusations of our own, the revelations of today leave that trust irrevocably broken.
So we have decided to remove the article from the site – not because we are saying that it contains falsehoods or errors but because we can no longer say to you as readers that we are confident to a reasonable certainty that it does not, which I take to be the implicit promise behind everything we publish.
As the Editor and Founder of TPM, I take full responsibility for this. We will continue to be diligent, rigorous and when necessary even a bit paranoid to be certain of the integrity of everything we publish at TPM.
Hmm. I grew up as a African-American in the economically depressed black neighborhoods of Richmond, California, and no one in my family was a murderer. In fact, to my knowledge no one in my neighborhood was a murderer either.
It concerns me greatly that articles like this one will be cited by supremacist groups as evidence of what they have been falsely arguing for a century, that black people are all murderers responsible for the vast majority of this country’s crime.
After all, a black writer who grew up with black people also says its so, right?
I share @seedoubleyou’s concern about how this article will be used. But I think the story has to be told. When I moved to Missouri in 1992, I was shocked by how segregated the neighborhoods were…very shocked. The homicide rate that hit a bit later was another shock. I was also shocked when I followed school buses picking up kids in my neighborhood and I exited after 5 miles of travel–the busing was just amazing…kids getting up at 5 and 6 am to be transported to school. I was shocked when I encountered a sobbing cafeteria worker who had a first grade child who was terrified to go to school because “people got hit”. I was shocked when businesses refused to come into the city to do any work on my home.
And I was beside myself when the white power structure sliced and diced the city across Congressional districts in order to dilute the voice of a mostly evenly split between white and black urban area. Black voices were cut down to size–as well as those of the urban whites.
I don’t have any answers other than political activism to keep important issues front and center.
The problem is that this:
isn’t really true, at least not in the extreme way it is in St. Louis. Some neighborhoods of Honolulu are economically depressed and segregated (with Hawaiians and other Pacific islanders), and yes there are drugs and more crime than in the surrounding areas. But the murder rate is still around 4 per 100,000.
A gut-wrenching story, yet much too wide a net has been cast. At a peak of 69 murders per 100K inhabitants and with this story pointing out that the killers are repeaters, it stretches arithmetic, although I’m hardly a statistician, to extrapolate killers in most families within the community. However illustrative and poignant a family situation as that narrated by the author, in the scheme of things one can hardly be accused of having an attitude if one spits out one’s porridge when told by a friend about killers in his family. It’s hardly normal, even in oppressed communities whose majority, carrying on with their lives, can easily find themselves brutalized by a handful of criminal individuals.
As an aside, James Baldwin needs to be remembered and quoted more as this author has done. All too often, the writings of, in my opinion, the most profound chronicler of America’s psyche have been unwisely forsaken.
Long before this article was written, even long before slavery was ended, white supremacists’ lies about black men’s brutality and inhumanity were already deeply embedded in our racist culture.
He’s telling a story about a family of drug dealers in St. Louis. If his surname was Corleone or Capone would you be so concerned about how this story might be used?
I hear an important American story being told about men with very few options who become criminals while staying involved in and hopeful for their children despite their version of doing what had to be done to survive.