The devil–er, my ghost-writer made me do it!
September 14th, 2007, 7:47 am · Post a Comment · posted by fsherman
Have you guys heard about the case of Alexis Debat?
A consultant/source/reporter for ABC news, Debat has also written exclusive interviews with Alan Greenspan, Nancy Pelosi, Bill Gates and most recently Barack Obama for a French magazine
Which is where the trouble started: The Obama interview never took place, which appears to be the case with most of the other exclusives.
Debat’s explanation: He paid reporter Rob Sherman (no relation) to interview Obama, then signed his own name to it, so all he’s really guilty of is being conned by Sherman—well, and not actually doing the work himself.
Only it turns out Sherman, a supposed Chicago Tribune reporter, is as fictitious as the interview (there’s a Chicago radio host of that name, but he didn’t write the interview either).
Speaking as a journalist, printing these interviews as his own work would be unethical of Debat, even if they’d been real. Having them published with no attempt to verify them (in Debat’s story, Sherman met him at a party and told him he could get the Obama interview but Debat made no attempt to confirm this or check it out) would be incompetent.
And Debat blaming his ghost-writer for fraud is no excuse. Put your name on a ghost-written work and it becomes yours, the same way that a politician has to take responsibility for their speech, even though it was written by someone on their staff. If Debat published lies on his own name, they’re his lies and he’ll have to take the heat.
Debat has apparently already been canned by ABC due to his failure to turn up any record that he has the doctorate he claims to have received from the Sorbonne. I hope they’ll go over his stories with a fine tooth comb and see if any of them can be trusted, much as other news organizations have had to do when journalists were proven as frauds.
Debat should also be discredited from any job that requires anything he says to be taken seriously, but Washington being Washington I won’t be surprised if his career as an “expert” keeps running.
