In a June 16 editorial, U.S. News & World Report editor Mort Zuckerman provided anecdotes to make the point that nowadays “anyone…can haul anybody into court for just about anything.” But Zuckerman’s facts turned out to be fiction — and now U.S. News is refusing to issue a correction.
Zuckerman claimed: “A woman throws a soft drink at her boyfriend at a restaurant, then slips on the floor she wet and breaks her tailbone. She sues. Bingo — a jury says the restaurant owes her $100,000! A woman tries to sneak through a restroom window at a nightclub to avoid paying the $3.50 cover charge. She falls, knocks out two front teeth, and sues. A jury awards her $12,000 for dental expenses.”
Zuckerman offered these incidents as proof that society is “rewarding cynical opportunists” and “punishing innocent people, like the owners of the restaurant and the nightclub.” But in fact, all they prove is that U.S. News needs to be more careful in checking its facts. As Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz pointed out in a June 23 column, the spilled drink lawsuit and the nightclub cheater lawsuit are long-discredited myths.
The myth-debunking website Snopes.com, which Kurtz cited, traces the bogus lawsuit anecdotes back to a piece of Internet spam from 2001, which listed six separate supposedly outrageous legal awards. “All of the entries in the list are fabrications — a search for news stories about each of these cases failed to turn up anything, as did a search for each law case,” the website reported last year (7/02). The original list, Snopes said, included a seventh example involving a microwaved poodle, which the site suggested had been dropped because “its inclusion would have immediately called into question the truthfulness of the other six cases for any number of folks familiar with urban legends.”
Snopes.com also said that the bogus list of lawsuits (sans poodle) had been reprinted in June 2002 by the New York Daily News, which “presented it solely as an e-mail it had received, making no statements as to its likeliness to be real or detailing any attempts that publication might have made to verify any of the entries.” (The Daily News is owned by Mort Zuckerman.)
It’s customary for a news outlet to offer a correction when it has offered fictional material as fact. But that was not U.S. News & World Report’s response to the discovery that its corporate chair and editor-in-chief had cited Internet hoaxes as key evidence in his editorial. Instead, the magazine ran a letter to the editor (7/30/03) from Mary Alexander, president of the Association of Trial Lawyers, calling the anecdotes “urbanmyths” — leaving readers to decide whether to believe the magazine’s editor or the head of an interested lobbying group about the stories’ veracity.
A spokesperson for Zuckerman, Ken Frydman, gave the Washington Post two rationales for why the magazine would not run a retraction: First, “These cases were reported in a variety of other reputable publications, such as the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the London Telegraph.” And: “Few Americans would disagree with the proposition that there are far too many frivolouslawsuits filed.”
So if a falsehood has been reported elsewhere, and you still believe your argument is true, then corrections aren’t necessary? That’s a novel interpretation of journalistic responsibility.
ACTION: Please ask U.S. News & World Report to issue a correction in linewith normal journalistic standards, and to check facts more carefully in thefuture.
U.S. News & World Report Phone: 202-955-2000 letters@usnews.com
