unable to verify the existence of 43 people she named in her columns
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Bee publishes results of Griego Erwin probe
[Erwin earned the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service Journalism in 1985 with the LA Times. ]
By Dorothy Korber and John Hill -- Bee Staff Writers
Published 2:15 am PDT Sunday, June 26, 2005
To our readers:
When Diana Griego Erwin resigned last month amid controversy, I promised you a deeper review of her work as a Bee columnist.
In the accompanying story, we report the results of our investigation. The findings are troubling: We have been unable to verify the existence of 43 people she named in her columns. This doesn't prove these people don't exist, but despite extensive research we have been unable to find them.
We know that credibility with our readers is at the heart of what we do. That's why we put this investigation through two lenses: a management team and a team of award-winning investigative reporters.
Recent ethical lapses at several newsrooms around the country spurred us to strengthen our editing standards and to work to elevate our performance. The questions that led to the investigation of Griego Erwin's columns grew out of that process.
But meeting these standards -and your expectations of us - requires constant vigilance. And we hope you will let us know in the future if you feel we have failed you.
I'm sorry our work with Diana Griego Erwin didn't meet our expectations or yours. Our recent lessons have been painful, but you have my word that we are committed to improving. Nothing means more to us than your trust and readership.
- Rick Rodriguez, executive editor
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An internal investigation into the published work of former Bee columnist Diana Griego Erwin found 43 cases in which individuals named by the writer could not be authenticated as real people.
Griego Erwin, whose column ran three days a week on The Bee's Metro page, resigned May 11 after she failed to substantiate details from several recent columns. She has denied fabricating any information.
The Bee investigation - conducted by reporters, editors and researchers - initially focused on Griego Erwin's work during the previous 16 months.
From Jan. 1, 2004, until her final column on April 26, Griego Erwin wrote 171 columns. The Bee's investigation found 30 names in 27 separate columns that could not be verified during that time period. The people could not be found in voter registration rolls, property records, telephone books, identity databases or through scores of phone calls.
In light of those findings, the review expanded to include a sampling of columns spanning her 12-year tenure with the newspaper, and 13 additional cases in another 10 columns were found.
Many of the columns in question fit a template: essays, often with a surprising O. Henry twist, about a singular person who faces a challenge and surmounts it. Their stories frequently reflect a theme taken from current headlines - wildfires, for example, or prison brutality, school shootings, murderous road rage or a high-profile trial.
Some are people with last names so unusual they don't appear anywhere in the United States. For example, a column that ran May 13, 1997, described Victor Budriyev, a Russian immigrant who lost his sweetheart to the bright lights of Los Angeles. The Bee could find no Victor Budriyev in the United States, nor a single citation for "Budriyev" in all of the massive Google search engine.
Some don't show up where they should: Donald Burton, a "barber" who is not on the state's list of licensed barbers. Margaret Brown, a "retired teacher" who is not on the rolls of the teachers retirement system. Others are described as longtime homeowners whose names do not appear on property records for their communities.
These are not anonymous sources; they all have names. And Griego Erwin often provided intimate details about the individuals and their lives, from the creases in their faces to the names of their pets.
"These are people we should have been able to find," said Bee Executive Editor Rick Rodriguez. "It kills us that we can't. We still hope they will turn up, but we're presenting the facts as we found them. Obviously, we feel strongly that we should have been able to find these individuals."
In the year preceding the inquiry, The Bee had significantly tightened its policy on use of anonymous sources in stories, part of a nationwide trend to ensure fairness and credibility in newspaper reporting.
"We had been talking about stricter standards for anonymous sources in news stories," Rodriguez said. "So we asked ourselves: Are we giving the columnists too much leeway?"
In that spirit, a red flag went up when an editor asked Griego Erwin a routine question on April 23: What was the name of the tavern where she interviewed Anthony Romero, the bartender who was a focal point of the column?
Griego Erwin said she couldn't remember, although the interview ostensibly took place the evening before.
"Two weeks later, when we still didn't have the answer to that question, it raised more questions," Rodriguez said.
Eventually, Griego Erwin identified a bar she thought might have been the place. However, that bar did not employ an Anthony Romero.
At the time of her resignation, Griego Erwin denied doing anything wrong. She said she was resigning for personal reasons and maintained that ultimately her sources would be proved authentic. In the weeks since, she has provided the newspaper with no further information.
Griego Erwin was not asked to participate in the broader review of her work that occurred after her resignation. She declined to be interviewed for this article, writing June 9 in an e-mail: "The story has been told and I am sad that The Bee continues to pursue this."
She took issue with the continued scrutiny, saying it is undeserved, and then concluded: "Surely there are more important stories out there than another about me. I know there are. Even now, I come across them every day."
Shortly before she quit, Bee editors asked her to supply contact information for people mentioned in four recent columns: Audrey Hellund, from a column decrying senseless violence; Elsie Chau, described as a downtown homeowner who befriended a homeless woman; Margaret Brown, quoted in a column about racial inequities; and Mary Magorki, featured in a column promoting self-defense for women.
Rodriguez said the people chosen should not have been difficult for her to track down, particularly because Griego Erwin appeared to have interviewed two of the subjects in their homes.
When she was unable to provide contact information for any of the four, editors became alarmed and broadened the inquiry. (The Bee's public editor printed the four names in his May 22 column, and none has come forward.)
Bee City Editor Stuart Drown did the initial review of the 171 columns. He started by eliminating people who were well known. For others, he checked Northern California phone listings - calling anyone with a similar name - and followed clues from the columns, contacting trailer parks, adoption agencies, bars, restaurants and numerous workplaces to try to find the people named.
Drown excluded unnamed sources from the review, because they would be impossible to check without Griego Erwin's cooperation.
He turned over the names of those who could not be found to the newspaper's director of editorial research, Pete Basofin.
Basofin ran them through California People Finder and Accurint, databases that provide addresses and phone numbers going back years. He also searched county property records, public documents such as court records, the newspaper's archives, and old city directories in The Bee's editorial research department.
In the end, 30 names still could not be confirmed, an outcome Basofin found surprising.
Given the reach of modern databases, "It's unusual when we can't find any trace of someone, particularly homeowners and people who vote," he said.
As a test of the newspaper's research system, editors did a random check of the work of three other Bee columnists. Editors checked out names from 36 columns written by Anita Creamer, R.E. Graswich and Bob Sylva. Every name in every column was easily verified.
During newsroom meetings called to address the Griego Erwin situation, some Bee staff members suggested investigative reporters be assigned to the inquiry as a further check. In response, Rodriguez assigned two reporters, asking them to examine Drown's findings and pursue the inquiry further.
They created a computer spreadsheet with details and characteristics from the problematic columns. From this grid, patterns emerged that the two reporters used to pinpoint earlier columns that needed to be reviewed.
Along with the whimsical nature of many of the columns in question, the reporters noted that vital identifiers often were missing: Though the person is named, no hometown is given, or no occupation, or the name is so common it defies pinning down.
Sometimes the site of the interview is oddly generic: "a senior center" with no name or location. Similarly, "a neighborhood coffeehouse" or a home "in a dip in a road in an older area of the county."
That last is from a column about Carrie Escarta that ran Sept. 26, 2004.
The Escarta column provides small details that run like threads through Griego Erwin's work: people discover hidden notes or keep poetry journals or read piles of books.
Escarta's neighborhood isn't mentioned. She is given no age or occupation. The elderly woman who previously owned the home - and left the secret notes and journals - is not named, nor the son who apparently forced her to move.
The column indicates Escarta had bought the house a few years before. But the Sacramento County recorder's database of deeds shows no one named Escarta buying a house in the past 15 years. Furthermore, the surname "Escarta" does not exist anywhere in California - or the nation - in any of The Bee's resources.
On Oct. 19, three weeks after the Escarta column, Griego Erwin wrote about 89-year-old Mary Carter, who was living "in a two-room cabin in the foothills a few miles outside of Georgetown," a town of about 960. The columnist said the woman lived alone - "so simply that the neighbors worry" - with her walls of books, poetry journals and two lolling cats.
No such woman can be found in El Dorado County property records, voter registration files, or The Bee's identity databases. In a phone interview, Alice Funk, a 50-year Georgetown resident and member of the Georgetown Seniors Club, interrupted her Yahtzee game to say she'd never heard of a Mary Carter, "and I think I would have if she lived around here."
Even so, the lack of data does not prove conclusively that this person was fabricated. She may have slipped through the cracks. But, as with the others, The Bee could not verify her existence.
Three weeks ago, The Bee widened the investigation to check columns going back to Griego Erwin's arrival at the newspaper in 1993. Though these subjects are harder to verify - they may have died or moved away - the newspaper does have access to early city directories and older electronic records. Through these sources, the reporters unearthed several cases that fit the pattern of other problem columns and could not be authenticated.
How could Griego Erwin's work have escaped editorial scrutiny for so long? Rodriguez says there are several reasons, beginning with her elevated status as a columnist and her journalistic credentials.
At age 25, Griego Erwin worked on a project that won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for public service for the Denver Post. She has received other prestigious national awards as well, including a George Polk award and the 1990 commentary prize from the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
"With a high-profile columnist, especially with the credentials present in this case, it is not first nature or even second nature to ask them if the person they're writing about actually exists," Rodriguez said. "Columnists are given more latitude in their writing style. It's more personalized. They share their voice and their views with the community."
The detailed descriptions that flowed through the narratives also lent a sense of credibility, he added.
"As an editor, when you get that many details from a writer, you're less likely to question the authenticity," Rodriguez said. "She even described the way the cat's tail was curling."
Another factor came into play. Unlike news stories, columns usually are not illustrated with photographs of the subject. That may change, according to Rodriguez.
One thing already has changed, he said.
"Our editors are asking tougher questions of our reporters," said Rodriguez. "I hope that the reporters will take it upon themselves to understand that the public trust has been violated here and so they will readily provide the information."
The Bee's investigation comes against a backdrop of recent journalism scandals. In the last two years, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times and the Detroit Free Press have grappled with ethical breaches involving fabrications or plagiarism.
Most recently, Newsweek retracted a report, based on an anonymous source, that guards at the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had flushed a Quran down a toilet.
This growing list erodes public trust in journalists, said Barbara O'Connor, a communications professor who heads the Institute for the Study of Politics and Media at California State University, Sacramento.
"There has been some increase in the number of these cases, but I don't think it's a great increase," she said. "It's just so much easier to ferret them out these days. With communications technology, it's easier for journalists to gather information - but it also makes it easier for their editors to find plagiarists or to check out the identity of folks in stories."
Although such cases have emerged across the country, Rodriguez believes they are not the norm.
"I don't think it is commonplace at all," he said. "Certainly not here. But there are 300 people working, gathering news for the paper. Can we say this will never happen again at The Bee? No. Nothing in life is guaranteed. All we can guarantee is we'll try harder." |
