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OK, I’ll bite, particularly since this question comes up anytime a journalist gets heat for making up boilerplate quotes. This question came up during the Jayson Blair saga which, as you’ll recall, started over pretty innocuous falsehoods. Occasionally someone will make up something from scratch, like Stephen Glass did, but the more frequent sin is people cheating around the edges, because most reporters, even the least ethical of them, don’t have a death wish.
I think Jack Shafer summarizes the need to punish fabricators best: “Hence, most reporters don’t make things up because 1) they’re as ethical as Jesus Christ or 2) they know they’ll get caught.”
Finally, journalists demand transparency from their subjects. They demand to know why legal, governmental, and business decisions are made; they insist on knowing what the rules of the game are. So it only makes sense that the watchdogs should be transparent about their own systems as well. Which is why it’s valuable to ask “what’s the big deal?” and equally valuable to try to answer it. It gives readers a chance to see what our rules are and what the penalties are for breaking them.
