Writing Guide #16
© 1981 by Ethel Grodzins Romm

A column on writing from Editor & Publisher September 5, 1981.

Attribution:
Never having to say you're sorry

(Ed. Note, 2009: This essay was remarkably prescient. In 1981, Cooke was the first Pulitzer to be turned in since 1932. Since then, famous hoaxes that might have been caught with more stringent attention to attribution include The Hitler Diaries, Jayson Blar, Stephen Glass; Oprah Book Club selections A Million Little Pieces and Angel at the Fence; these and others collected in a list of Other Literary Hoaxes)

Attribution is so, well, boring to green writers. Why, they ask, waste a whole line and risk losing the reader with

ROME. May 23 -- Doctors treating Pope John Paul II said today that he was out of danger and should be recovered from his gunshot wounds within 10 days.

Why not get to the heart of the news at once with this:

Pope John Paul II is out of danger and should be recovered from his gunshot wounds within 60 days.

Why quote doctors, in the lead or anywhere else? Where else would those medical facts have come from?

But not all medical stories come from doctors. Readers need to know you didn't pick up your story from the hospital switchboard operator. Or from the last part of a radio spot, having missed the opener that ascribed the story to Madame La Foney, who has claimed she forecast the event last week, and is now enlightening the world with the Pope's horoscope.

What must be revealed in a news story is who or what told you. Only then will your story have credibility. In those rare cases where you must say "sources close to the pope," or "a secret Vatican bulletin dated May 22," write as clear a description as is permitted and tell your editor which person or what document told you.

Before Janet Cooke passed off fiction as fact and won a Pulitzer Footnote 1, most journalism textbooks were advising reporters that attribution was being overdone. In happier, more trusting times, our chief guru on newspaper writing, Roy H. Copperud, could advise (1960), "Attribution has become such a mania...." "The young reporter...comes to think of attribution as a virtue, rather than as an necessary evil."

Theodore M. Bernstein, NY Times (1958): "The ultimate in attribution... is the apocryphal filler piece, ' The moon is 238,000 miles from the earth, according to the Associated Press.' Short of that absurd extreme, many unnecessary attributions are inserted into stories by over-zealous copy editors."

After Cooke, zealousness must be the watchword, at the risk of some over-zealousness. The pendulum will doubtless swing to over-attribution. So be it, a small price to pay for credibility. Journalism may never recover from the damage Cooke has done to it, but the place to begin repair is with relentless attribution.

The routine story of the pope's prognosis is a good example. By the first week of July, his doctors had begun to hedge. With three weeks to go on their first rosy prediction, they began saying they couldn't say when he will recover. Lawrence K. Altman's May lead in The New York Times is not only Journalism 101. It leaves him even today with no egg on his face.

Attribution is never having to say you're sorry.

We are left with the problem of the reader's boredom. How can attribution be made to read smoothly, so it doesn't come to the reader in indigestible lumps?