Earlier today I mentioned Nick Sylvester’s Village Voice article about pickup artists. The Voice fired him for taking liberties with the truth–for mixing reporting and riffing a little too ambiguously.
The lesson: if you make stuff up and put it in a newspaper, make it obvious that you’re making stuff up. Case in point: Sylvester’s 2005 Voice article on college cheating methods.
But wait! Apparently even that’s not enough. In reporting last month on Sylvester’s pickup piece, AP writer David Caruso mentioned Sylvester’s cheating piece:
In an August story about cheating on college campuses, Sylvester described interviewing a student who spent $500,000 to have a multiplication table tattooed over his entire body; a Harvard Medical School graduate who cheated with Morse code; a Boston College junior named Simeon Criz who cheated using a specially designed deck of playing cards; and a Manhattan doctor named Noam Feldstein who delivers "a hundred newborn babies each day."
Boston College said it had no record of a student named Simeon Criz. The board that licenses doctors in New York said it had no record of a physician named Noam Feldstein.
In all fairness, I believe it was the AP that broke the story that the guy in Prison Break is an actor.
(Oh, how relieved I would be to learn that Caruso and his editors were merely reenacting this gag.)
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