liar liar, pants on fire
Jul. 1st, 2001 06:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scottobearRemember the relatively horrifying monkeyfishing article I pointed to a few weeks back? It turns out that parts of it were totally fabricated. What's more, Slate now has to go back through Jay Forman's other articles, and there appear to be other (less significant) details that have been made up.
Tortured Tale of Journalism and Monkeys
By ALEX KUCZYNSKI
he column in Slate, the online magazine, began with the fairy-tale phrase "once upon a time."
It went on to describe a monkey-infested island in the Florida Keys and a cruel sport once practiced by the local residents that was known as "monkey fishing." The fishermen, the story continued, would bait their hooks with apples and practice a form of catch-and-release fishing for the rhesus monkeys that had been bred on the island for medical research.
While the column began with the sing- song language of a fairy tale, the account itself appears to be a fairy tale.
Executives from Charles River Laboratories, a company that raises laboratory animals and that bred the monkeys on the island, said last week that the article could not possibly be true. Local charter fishermen who have fished the area for decades, Florida wildlife and conservation officers, officers from the Key West Chamber of Commerce and a Key West historian also said that the practice of monkey fishing has never existed as sport among fishermen.
Even the companion that Jay Forman, the Slate columnist, brought on his adventure in the Keys a few years back, said last week that the men did not actually hook any monkeys out of the trees, as the column stated, and that he had no direct evidence that anyone else ever had.
Slate editors last week stood by the article, but over the weekend, the editor, Michael Kinsley, said that he would run a statement on Slate saying key aspects of the article had been fabricated.
"The Shame of Fishing for Monkeys" was first posted on June 7, the third in a series of columns on the subject of human vice by Mr. Forman, a freelance writer who has also written a parody book titled "Chicken Pies for the Soul." But it drew criticism from OpinionJournal.com, The Wall Street Journal's online opinion page, which called the idea "preposterous." Mr. Kinsley "has fallen for an obvious hoax," it said. And Slate readers e-mailed in their doubts. Other Web sites also raised questions, but none proved that the events described in the story were not true.
Mr. Forman's column about monkey fishing around the island of Lois Key describes how "a sport evolved among the local fishermen," in which sturdy deep-sea poles intended for 200-pound fish "were the preferred tackle."
It described one scene like this: "Once the bait was on the hook, I watched as the monkey-fisherman cast it onto the island, then waited. Not for long. The monkeys swarmed round the treat, and when the fisherman felt a strong tug he jerked the pole. I knew he had hooked one by the shriek it made — a primal yowl that set my hair on end. The monkey came flying from the trees, a juicy apple stapled to its palm."
The fisherman, Mr. Forman wrote, practiced catch-and-release fishing with the monkey. "The line was cut, and the monkey floundered back to await medical testing," he wrote.
Though Mr. Forman defended his story, a friend, Marc Caputo, a reporter for The Palm Beach Post who accompanied Mr. Forman on the trip, said that the fisherman actually did not send his line flying up into the trees, that monkeys did not swarm around the fruit, that the fisherman did not succeed in catching any monkeys and no one cut any fishing lines. He said he had heard of monkey fishing only from one other person, a Key West fisherman.
And that fisherman, it turns out, acknowledges that he has a reputation for practical jokes.
In Florida, skeptics abound. Tim Carlile, a charter boat captain at the Sugarloaf Marina on Sugarloaf Key, who has led expeditions for tarpon and bonefish around Lois Key since 1964, said that he and several colleagues, who are charter fishermen, had discussed the article, and no one believed it.
"Somebody is pulling somebody's leg," he said. "I have never seen it or heard of it." He added that it would be logistically impossible to cast a rod with an apple attached to it.
Dennis R. Shaughnessy, the senior vice president for business development and corporate counsel for Charles River Laboratories, based in Wilmington, Mass., said that the company had raised rhesus monkeys on the island until it removed them about three years ago. He said monkey fishing was not possible. Because the monkeys on Lois Key were extremely rare and valuable, they were carefully maintained, he said.
Imported from India in the mid- 1970's on a biosecure charter jet, the monkeys were used in the AIDS protease-inhibitor studies and cost between $5,000 and $10,000 each. The animals were all tagged and accounted for on a daily basis and any visible injuries — like one that would be sustained by a fishing hook — would have been noticed by the site's managers.
Besides that, Mr. Shaughnessy said, the strongest evidence against the story is that rhesus monkeys just aren't that dumb. "It is not factually possible to hook a monkey on a fishing pole," he said. "They are much too smart, and too strong, and would not eat in that fashion. None of it fits."
He said the monkeys were their own best security. "Unless they know a person, they would never get close enough to be visible, let alone eat from a hook," he said.
Thomas Hambright, a Florida historian based at the Monroe County Library on Key West, said that if the practice existed as a sport that had evolved among local fishermen, as Mr. Forman described it, he would have heard of it. It would have come to the attention of Charles River or the United States Agriculture Department, he said.
Lt. Roy Payne of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said that he has patrolled the keys for 13 years. He lives two miles from Lois Key and during the time the monkeys were in that habitat, he said he never during his patrols saw anything resembling monkey fishing.
"It is our job to know of such a thing, and we have never heard of it," he said. "And monkeys are not very sociable creatures. They would never approach a stranger."
Mr. Forman's editor, Jack Shafer, said last week that in editing the article, he put Mr. Forman through his own due diligence to check the first-person account.
"If you're talking about a New Yorker story about the geology of the Allegheny Mountains that is filled with numbers and dates and measurements, then a team of fact checkers to go and check something extraordinarily technical would make sense," he said.
In this case, he said, he asked Mr. Forman a series of questions: Is there a Lois Key? Were rhesus monkeys bred there? Did people know about the rhesus monkeys? Was there monkey excrement, as described by Mr. Forman, in the water?
"It is the duty of the editor to sound out the writer," said Mr. Shafer, who often writes media criticism on Slate. In 1998, he wrote an article bemoaning how, as a reader, he had not been able to figure out that the New Republic reporter Stephen Glass was a hoax writer. Last year he wrote an article critical of New Yorker editors for not being able to smoke out a hoax story about an Internet company published in the magazine last year.
"Jay writes about the sordid, the unpalatable, the amoral," Mr. Shafer said last week. "In terms of gathering up eyewitnesses, there are no Web cams. There is no paper trail. I believe that what he wrote is true."
Mr. Shafer said that while investigating the criticism about the article, he again spoke with Mr. Forman and also spoke to Mr. Caputo, the Palm Beach Post reporter, but did not speak to other possible sources.
Mr. Caputo said that when he spoke with Mr. Shafer, he was asked about the logistics of the trip, rather than the specifics, like snagging a monkey from a tree.
In an interview last week, Mr. Caputo said that the trip was originally intended as an afternoon of tarpon fishing.
The tarpon were not biting, he said, and the members of the fishing party — himself, Mr. Forman and a fisherman — had been drinking. Mr. Caputo said that the three men had used lighter tackle than Mr. Forman had written about. He said that the fishing trip took place in 1994, not 1996, as Mr. Forman wrote. The men did not catch any monkeys, certainly none with apples stapled to their palm, Mr. Caputo said.
Mr. Forman did not return phone calls over the weekend.
Mr. Caputo said that the Key West fisherman said he had practiced monkey fishing on the island. But in an interview on Friday, the fisherman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that only once before the journey with Mr. Forman and Mr. Caputo — "maybe twice," he said — he got drunk and rowed out to Lois Key, to bait monkeys with a fishing rod.
"I didn't like those monkeys," he said. But he said that he was not able to catch any monkeys out of trees or wrangle them into the water, and that he had never heard of any other fisherman who had, and that monkey fishing had never been a local sport, as Mr. Forman's column reported. "It was a crazy one-time drunken thing," he said.
The fisherman added with a laugh that he has been the source of Key West rumors before. Ten years ago, he plastered fake labels over tins of Vienna sausage, which read "Manatee Pâté: Enjoy an Endangered Species While You Still Can." The fisherman said that the hoax was so convincing that Florida natural resource authorities tried to investigate the manatee pâté, and it was mentioned on "Late Night with David Letterman."
He said he still had tins of the hoax pâté in his kitchen.
In an e-mail letter over the weekend, Mr. Kinsley wrote, "The story we published was fiction in key aspects. We are ashamed and embarrassed, and we apologize."
On the vetting of stories, he added: "It is ridiculous to say, as some have, that everything we did after the controversy arose should have been done beforehand. No publication, however extravagant its fact-checking system, checks every word of every article as if it had been challenged in the national media."
Tortured Tale of Journalism and Monkeys
By ALEX KUCZYNSKI
he column in Slate, the online magazine, began with the fairy-tale phrase "once upon a time."
It went on to describe a monkey-infested island in the Florida Keys and a cruel sport once practiced by the local residents that was known as "monkey fishing." The fishermen, the story continued, would bait their hooks with apples and practice a form of catch-and-release fishing for the rhesus monkeys that had been bred on the island for medical research.
While the column began with the sing- song language of a fairy tale, the account itself appears to be a fairy tale.
Executives from Charles River Laboratories, a company that raises laboratory animals and that bred the monkeys on the island, said last week that the article could not possibly be true. Local charter fishermen who have fished the area for decades, Florida wildlife and conservation officers, officers from the Key West Chamber of Commerce and a Key West historian also said that the practice of monkey fishing has never existed as sport among fishermen.
Even the companion that Jay Forman, the Slate columnist, brought on his adventure in the Keys a few years back, said last week that the men did not actually hook any monkeys out of the trees, as the column stated, and that he had no direct evidence that anyone else ever had.
Slate editors last week stood by the article, but over the weekend, the editor, Michael Kinsley, said that he would run a statement on Slate saying key aspects of the article had been fabricated.
"The Shame of Fishing for Monkeys" was first posted on June 7, the third in a series of columns on the subject of human vice by Mr. Forman, a freelance writer who has also written a parody book titled "Chicken Pies for the Soul." But it drew criticism from OpinionJournal.com, The Wall Street Journal's online opinion page, which called the idea "preposterous." Mr. Kinsley "has fallen for an obvious hoax," it said. And Slate readers e-mailed in their doubts. Other Web sites also raised questions, but none proved that the events described in the story were not true.
Mr. Forman's column about monkey fishing around the island of Lois Key describes how "a sport evolved among the local fishermen," in which sturdy deep-sea poles intended for 200-pound fish "were the preferred tackle."
It described one scene like this: "Once the bait was on the hook, I watched as the monkey-fisherman cast it onto the island, then waited. Not for long. The monkeys swarmed round the treat, and when the fisherman felt a strong tug he jerked the pole. I knew he had hooked one by the shriek it made — a primal yowl that set my hair on end. The monkey came flying from the trees, a juicy apple stapled to its palm."
The fisherman, Mr. Forman wrote, practiced catch-and-release fishing with the monkey. "The line was cut, and the monkey floundered back to await medical testing," he wrote.
Though Mr. Forman defended his story, a friend, Marc Caputo, a reporter for The Palm Beach Post who accompanied Mr. Forman on the trip, said that the fisherman actually did not send his line flying up into the trees, that monkeys did not swarm around the fruit, that the fisherman did not succeed in catching any monkeys and no one cut any fishing lines. He said he had heard of monkey fishing only from one other person, a Key West fisherman.
And that fisherman, it turns out, acknowledges that he has a reputation for practical jokes.
In Florida, skeptics abound. Tim Carlile, a charter boat captain at the Sugarloaf Marina on Sugarloaf Key, who has led expeditions for tarpon and bonefish around Lois Key since 1964, said that he and several colleagues, who are charter fishermen, had discussed the article, and no one believed it.
"Somebody is pulling somebody's leg," he said. "I have never seen it or heard of it." He added that it would be logistically impossible to cast a rod with an apple attached to it.
Dennis R. Shaughnessy, the senior vice president for business development and corporate counsel for Charles River Laboratories, based in Wilmington, Mass., said that the company had raised rhesus monkeys on the island until it removed them about three years ago. He said monkey fishing was not possible. Because the monkeys on Lois Key were extremely rare and valuable, they were carefully maintained, he said.
Imported from India in the mid- 1970's on a biosecure charter jet, the monkeys were used in the AIDS protease-inhibitor studies and cost between $5,000 and $10,000 each. The animals were all tagged and accounted for on a daily basis and any visible injuries — like one that would be sustained by a fishing hook — would have been noticed by the site's managers.
Besides that, Mr. Shaughnessy said, the strongest evidence against the story is that rhesus monkeys just aren't that dumb. "It is not factually possible to hook a monkey on a fishing pole," he said. "They are much too smart, and too strong, and would not eat in that fashion. None of it fits."
He said the monkeys were their own best security. "Unless they know a person, they would never get close enough to be visible, let alone eat from a hook," he said.
Thomas Hambright, a Florida historian based at the Monroe County Library on Key West, said that if the practice existed as a sport that had evolved among local fishermen, as Mr. Forman described it, he would have heard of it. It would have come to the attention of Charles River or the United States Agriculture Department, he said.
Lt. Roy Payne of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said that he has patrolled the keys for 13 years. He lives two miles from Lois Key and during the time the monkeys were in that habitat, he said he never during his patrols saw anything resembling monkey fishing.
"It is our job to know of such a thing, and we have never heard of it," he said. "And monkeys are not very sociable creatures. They would never approach a stranger."
Mr. Forman's editor, Jack Shafer, said last week that in editing the article, he put Mr. Forman through his own due diligence to check the first-person account.
"If you're talking about a New Yorker story about the geology of the Allegheny Mountains that is filled with numbers and dates and measurements, then a team of fact checkers to go and check something extraordinarily technical would make sense," he said.
In this case, he said, he asked Mr. Forman a series of questions: Is there a Lois Key? Were rhesus monkeys bred there? Did people know about the rhesus monkeys? Was there monkey excrement, as described by Mr. Forman, in the water?
"It is the duty of the editor to sound out the writer," said Mr. Shafer, who often writes media criticism on Slate. In 1998, he wrote an article bemoaning how, as a reader, he had not been able to figure out that the New Republic reporter Stephen Glass was a hoax writer. Last year he wrote an article critical of New Yorker editors for not being able to smoke out a hoax story about an Internet company published in the magazine last year.
"Jay writes about the sordid, the unpalatable, the amoral," Mr. Shafer said last week. "In terms of gathering up eyewitnesses, there are no Web cams. There is no paper trail. I believe that what he wrote is true."
Mr. Shafer said that while investigating the criticism about the article, he again spoke with Mr. Forman and also spoke to Mr. Caputo, the Palm Beach Post reporter, but did not speak to other possible sources.
Mr. Caputo said that when he spoke with Mr. Shafer, he was asked about the logistics of the trip, rather than the specifics, like snagging a monkey from a tree.
In an interview last week, Mr. Caputo said that the trip was originally intended as an afternoon of tarpon fishing.
The tarpon were not biting, he said, and the members of the fishing party — himself, Mr. Forman and a fisherman — had been drinking. Mr. Caputo said that the three men had used lighter tackle than Mr. Forman had written about. He said that the fishing trip took place in 1994, not 1996, as Mr. Forman wrote. The men did not catch any monkeys, certainly none with apples stapled to their palm, Mr. Caputo said.
Mr. Forman did not return phone calls over the weekend.
Mr. Caputo said that the Key West fisherman said he had practiced monkey fishing on the island. But in an interview on Friday, the fisherman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that only once before the journey with Mr. Forman and Mr. Caputo — "maybe twice," he said — he got drunk and rowed out to Lois Key, to bait monkeys with a fishing rod.
"I didn't like those monkeys," he said. But he said that he was not able to catch any monkeys out of trees or wrangle them into the water, and that he had never heard of any other fisherman who had, and that monkey fishing had never been a local sport, as Mr. Forman's column reported. "It was a crazy one-time drunken thing," he said.
The fisherman added with a laugh that he has been the source of Key West rumors before. Ten years ago, he plastered fake labels over tins of Vienna sausage, which read "Manatee Pâté: Enjoy an Endangered Species While You Still Can." The fisherman said that the hoax was so convincing that Florida natural resource authorities tried to investigate the manatee pâté, and it was mentioned on "Late Night with David Letterman."
He said he still had tins of the hoax pâté in his kitchen.
In an e-mail letter over the weekend, Mr. Kinsley wrote, "The story we published was fiction in key aspects. We are ashamed and embarrassed, and we apologize."
On the vetting of stories, he added: "It is ridiculous to say, as some have, that everything we did after the controversy arose should have been done beforehand. No publication, however extravagant its fact-checking system, checks every word of every article as if it had been challenged in the national media."
