Can members of the press be charged (and convicted) of a crime for making up stories they know to be false?
What criminal law are you suggesting has been broken by a reporter making up a story?
Depending on the content I suppose fraud could be charged (e.g. the story solicits monetary donations to support a person/cause/charity that doesn’t exist).
IANAL etc.
But what would we Brits do, with our tabloids reduced to nothing but ads, TV listings and the crossword? 
Possibly libel, if the story involved non-fictional individuals.
Yes, and they can be sentenced to a big, fat BOOK DEAL and the inconvenience of making the rounds of the TALK SHOW CIRCUIT, along with the sheer horror of having a MAJOR MOTION PICTURE made about them featuring actors FAR MORE ATTRACTIVE than they are.
What a rough life.
<HIJACK>
With the 24-hour news channels and the internet, there has been a great expansion of coverage, but the increase of news events has been unable to keep up.
There’s just not enough news to go around anymore.
</HIJACK>
Do you consider the tabloids to be “press”?
If they use the fake news story to help sell a newspaper, then that sounds like fraud to me.
BTW, I’m talking about the normal newspapers like the New York Times or the Washington Post. In the US at least, the tabloids are little more than entertainment.
It’s not clear that the courts recognize that distinction. The US tabloids (National Enquirer, etc) have broken real news stories in the past.
How could you forget the Page 3 Girls?!?!
It would be a right crisis if we forgot the page 3 girls.
There is a corresponding American version (the page 5 girl, in the Weekly World News), but as we are prudes, it’s slightly less fun.
And, of course, there is always, The Onion, that actually makes up ALL of their stories. If there were something directly illegal about making up news stories, The Onion would have been out of business a long time ago.
As others have said, it only becomes a problem if you libel someone or you are intending to defraud someone.
I don’t think criminal charges or civil suits were ever brought against Jayson Blair or Janet Cooke; the newspapers’ only recourse is to fire the fraudulent reporters and drag their names through the mud in a huge public way so they’ll never hold a steady media job ever again.
BTW, what these writers did is pretty widespread and commonplace, to the degree that I’m not exactly sure why they were held up for such high-profile excoriation. IMO, their biggest sin was reminding big media outlets that they are not, in fact, the Infallible Fourth Branch of Government and that everything they print should be taken with a grain of salt.
In the U.S. at least, there is no criminal law forbidding news organizations from running fake stories. If the story defames and actual person, and if it can be proved the news organization knew the story was false, it would be in a good position to lose a libel suit, but that’s civil law, not criminal.
After the stories about high school basketball phenomenon LeBron James ran, an alternative paper here in St. Louis ran a story about a similarlytalented girl player who was being aggressively pursued by both colleges and the WNBA. At the end of the story they revealed they made the whole thing up. They lost a good deal of credibility, but nothing more.
When you see The Daily Show’s mix of real interviews with politicians and “fake news” you just have to hope someone there is keeping track of the mix.
And Krokodil, I sincerely doubt that what Blair and Cooke did is “pretty widespread and commonplace.” I’ve worked in or with news organizations for 30 years, and even the most amateurish of them would generally rather die than to lose their credibility.
You’ve got a ten-year head start on me, then. I don’t know many reporters* who would perpetrate that degree of fraud, but it’s a rare reporter who doesn’t cut a lot of corners in the course of a career.
As one editor explained to me: Read any article on an unfamiliar subject, and you’ll think “My, what a knowledgable person this journalist is!” But read an article on any subject you actually know something about, and you’ll see gaping errors of fact. Unfortunately, the article that impressed you as “knowledgable” was just as bad, and they were all errors that made it in through laziness above all else.
Blair and Cooke weren’t diabolical; they were just lavishly rewarded for laziness, to the degree that they stopped doing actual legwork for attention-grabbing stories. They differ from the bottom 20% in degree, not in kind.
*I worked with Jayson Blair very briefly, and had no clue of what was to come.
Except, of course, for April 1st when they insert a true story.
This statement is qualitatively different from …
I’ve been in the news business since 1988 and I certainly have never done anything like what Blair or Cooke did, and should I find out that any of my colleagues have done such things, I would be all for holding them up to high-profile excoriation and sending them packing.
That kind of behavior is just not acceptable in the mainstream American news media. The fact that it might be difficult to catch when it does happen is a different issue.
This doesn’t support any of your conclusions above regarding whether what Blair and Cooke did was “widespread and commonplace,” because this is not the kind of thing that they were excoriated for doing. This is also not not supportive of your assertion that reporters “cut a lot of corners.”
The basic fact of the matter is that reporters often have to write about things that they don’t fully understand. That their resulting work may come out low quality has nothing to do with your assertions about the news media.
Bullcrap. I and every reporter I know goes out, covers a story, and then writes about what we saw and what we were told. The fact that we might then make mistakes is not merely a difference of degree from sitting at home and making things up or inventing fictional characters to fill a stereotype.
Diabolical? That I don’t know about. Blair and Cooke and Jack Kelley did things that were dishonest and shameful and undermined the credibility of the publications they worked for and hurt their entire profession. They deserved to be kicked in the ass and then off their publications. I have never pulled any of the crap they did and I, for one, resent being tarred with that brush, whether by degree or kind.
I am no defender of lazy or sloppy reportring. God knows I’ve made my share of mistakes, and seen others who make more than their share. Fact is, even the best reporters make mistakes, and what separates a responsible journalist from an irresponsible one is often the willingness to admit to an honest mistake.
But , Krokodil, I hope that you, I and acsenray would agree that incompetence is a quantum step away from the deliberate deception that Cooke, Blair, Kelley and a handful of others have been caught at, and a quantum step from the idea of “making stories up they know to be false” the OP asks about.
Of the “bottom 20%” you know of, how many do you think are deliberately dishonest, and how many are simply lousy reporters?
If by “quantum step” you mean of a completely different kind and degree, then, yes, I agree with you.
Let’s throw Stephen Glass in there as well.
And I’d like to note that I’ve never written for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the New Republic, or USA Today. I wonder whether there is an aspect of corruption at the top of the profession caused by the pressure of celebrity status. I understand, that in the case of Jack Kelley (and perhaps Jayson Blair), that staffers of and below his level had suspicions about his work, but his superiors were so enamored of his star status that they ignored it.
One thing I am convinced of, as soon as a journalist becomes a celebrity, it’s trouble.