Another perspective

I got a great e-mail from the reporter whose story I recently used as a cautionary tale of a source (or wildly popular author) possibly fudging the facts in the name of story telling. David, the writer, had this to say about his profile of a pastor whose story of post-Katrina aid seemed a bit too dramatic:

I, too, was troubled by that piece of
journalism, especially after the reports were
circulating that no one had been raped or killed
because of the violence. I read a lengthy AJR piece
recently written by New Orleans Times-Picayune
reporter Brian Thevenot that essentially said media
outlets, including his, were wrong about the carnage
that supposedly happened in New Orleans.

The (pastor) piece worried me in part because he
said some of the same things to me about New Orleans
that he had said to me after working at Ground Zero
after 9-11: that he was in counseling, that it was the
worst thing he'd ever seen, etc., etc. You hate not to
believe a guy who's giving you such vivid detail,
especially a man of the cloth, but I'd more likely
believe Don Kaput's allergy to electricity now than I
would believe (the pastor). Because I WANT to believe a
guy like (the pastor), a man who even blessed me in the
parking lot of The Union after our interview in
September.

Was that guy a fraud? I don't think so, but in the
heat of the storytelling moment, I think he took
liberties that he knew we probably would never try to
verify and thus take at face value.

Just as a side note, I've deleted the pastor's name because, for all I know, he could have been telling the truth 100 percent, and I'd hate for this post to come up when someone googles his name. But of course you can find his name in the link.

The AJR story (that's American Journalism Review, for the non journalism-obsessed) that David mentions is great reading, by the way. In case you don't plow through all of it, though, here's a good summary paragraph about a New York Times writer who tried to confirm the stories of rape and murder in the aftermath of Katrina:

The paper also dispatched stringers to shelters in Houston and Austin, Dwyer says, where they found no shortage of secondhand or thirdhand accounts of rape and murder – but none that seemed credible enough to discount Dwyer's original thesis. "Nobody could say they saw rapes and murders. It was always three or four steps removed, like 'my sister's uncle's cousin'" had seen the violence, he says.