After some impressive detective work by several journalists, it was revealed early this week that Amina Arraf, the supposed author of blog “A Gay Girl in Damascus,” was a fictional character created by a forty-year-old straight man in Scotland.
Tom MacMaster, a sometime fantasy novelist, had created an elaborate online life for Amina over several years—recently garnering the most amount of attention and concern for “Amina” by describing her kidnapping from her town in Syria. The next day, the editor of the lesbian website Lez Get Real, which had frequently published Amina’s writing, also turned out to be a fake. “Paula Brooks” was actually a fifty-eight-year-old construction worker in Ohio named Bill Graber.
The particulars of these two gentlemen’s motives and methods aside, the episode reminds us anew of the perils of relying on unknown sources for story tips and information. The Guardian was fooled. So were many more. The main culprit himself, MacMaster, says he was able to get away with the hoax thanks to the media’s “superficial” coverage of the Middle East. But, as the AP’s Jill Lawless points out, Amina’s story was especially tempting because of the context surrounding it:
For readers hungry for news of the uprisings sweeping the Arab world, it was gold dust—a gripping, firsthand account of a country from which most foreign journalists are excluded.
For stories like this, where firsthand information is at a premium, it’s inevitable that the media will rely on blogs and Twitter for whatever updates we can get—see Andy Carvin’s curatorial Retweeting, and Sohab Athar’s accidental account of the bin Laden raid in Pakistan. And it might be impractical to demand direct phone interviews (IP addresses? birth certificates?) of every online author. So where does that leave us? What should be our best practices when it comes to using information found on blogs for news articles? And what about for news organizations’ aggregation blogs—do those have different standards?
Not that I mind crediting the Washington Post and journalists, but you should acknowledge that the underlying work was done by other bloggers.
#1 Posted by Thalia, CJR on Tue 14 Jun 2011 at 08:07 PM
Indeed, actually, the most important parts of the detective work were done by bloggers and commentators of the Electronic Intifada. They came up with MacMaster's name after finding "Amina's" connection with a discussion group on "alnternate history". They contacted one of the participants who turned out to have a real life mail address, which turned out to be MacMaster's home. And the WaPo journalists correctly acknoledged the role of the bloggers in their story. You should do so, too.
#2 Posted by Gray, CJR on Wed 15 Jun 2011 at 05:07 AM
Also, Kudos to Liz Henry of bookmaniac.org and her commenters, who were the first to find "Amina's" connection to the alternate history discussion board. Looks like they were the first to contact Scott Palter, too, who had the decisive evidence (the mail address) which enabled Electronic Intifada to expose MacMaster as the sole real world contact of "Amina"
As commenter Kristin at bookmaniac.org rightly asked:
"Why is the media so slow on this stuff?"
It were the bloggers and netizen who found the smoking gun, not the journalists, who focussed on contacting "Paula Brooks", the fake lesbian activist. While this sure was an interesting sideline of the story, it was a dead end street that didn't lead to establishing MacMaster as a suspect. That honor belongs to the folks of bookmaniac.org and electronicintifada.net!
#3 Posted by Gray, CJR on Wed 15 Jun 2011 at 07:51 AM
Hi Thalia and Gray, thanks for the comments. Agreed - credit is due, and credit is given. You'll see that the first sentence of this post links out to four places - the first two of which are the community on Electronic Intifada and Liz Henry on BookManiac.org.
#4 Posted by Lauren Kirchner, CJR on Wed 15 Jun 2011 at 10:23 AM