Journalist Janet Cooke’s article “Jimmy’s World,” the story of an eight-year-old heroin addict, earned for her a Pulitzer Prize in 1981. Inconsistencies in her credentials led colleagues to question the veracity of her prize-winning story, which she confessed to having fabricated. The journalistic fraud, one of the first such scandals in the United States, tainted the credibility of journalists but also led to updated truth-in-reporting standards for news media.
In August and September of 1980, The Washington Post published eight articles about the scourge of heroin use. The last article in the series, “Jimmy’s World,” was written by journalist Janet Cooke and published in the September 28 edition of the newspaper.
Janet Cooke reacts to news that she won a Pulitzer Prize.
“Jimmy’s World” focuses on the life of an eight-year-old heroin addict named Jimmy by Cooke. Cooke describes Jimmy’s life as one “of hard drugs, fast money and the good life he believes both can bring.” Jimmy, Cooke writes, is motivated by the pursuit of material wealth—through illegitimate methods. His only interest in school is to learn enough mathematics so he can buy and sell drugs in his neighborhood.
In 1969, U.S. president Richard Nixon had described drugs as “public enemy number one in the United States.” By 1971 he had officially declared a so-called war on drugs. However, the drug war became stagnant after Nixon’s resignation following the Watergate scandal. By the presidential election of 1980, drug use, which never subsided, was back on the national agenda.
In the article, Cooke tells readers that Jimmy became a heroin addict at the age of five. He had asked his mother’s live-in boyfriend when he would be allowed to “get off.” According to the article, his mother’s boyfriend “let him snort a little” and was surprised when “the little dude” Jimmy “really did get off.” The article asserts that Jimmy was hooked within six months. The article also suggests that Jimmy’s mother knew of her son’s addiction. Cooke, who is African American, claims that his mother viewed his drug use as an inevitable aspect of the life of a black child growing up in the city.
The article also thoroughly describes specific circumstances in the life of Jimmy’s mother that affected her life and the life of her son. According to Cooke, Jimmy’s mother never knew her father. She had been sexually abused by her mother’s live-in boyfriends (Jimmy was the son of one of these men), and she turned to drugs for escape. Eventually, she turned to prostitution and property crime to support her drug addiction. Cooke ends her article by writing that at the end of a long day in which Jimmy answered her questions about his life, his behavior and demeanor began to change; he became “jittery” and “ill-behaved,” clearly suffering withdrawal symptoms. Cooke describes how the mother’s live-in boyfriend calls Jimmy over to him and injects him with his next drug fix.
Citizens and community leaders in the Washington, D.C., area were outraged by the living conditions and drug abuse Cooke featured in her article. District of Columbia mayor Marion Barry and Police Chief Burtell Jefferson ordered a districtwide search for a child who fit Jimmy’s description. Social service agencies and schools were told to instruct their employees to look for children with needle marks on their bodies and for children exhibiting behaviors that resembled withdrawal from drugs.
The managing editors of The Washington Post were asked to produce information about where Jimmy could be found, but they refused on the grounds that it would violate the confidentiality of the sources used in the feature. As a goodwill gesture, The Washington Post established a team of eleven reporters who were given the task of finding other children who suffered like Jimmy, reasoning that if there was one Jimmy there had to be others. Given the reality of the case, it is not surprising, then, that city officials and journalists could not locate Jimmy or any other child like him.
An assistant managing editor at The Washington Post, Bob Woodward, himself a Pulitzer winner for helping to break the Watergate affair, nominated Cooke’s article for a Pulitzer Prize. He deflected mounting criticism of Cooke and maintained the story was true. On April 13, 1981, Cooke won a Pulitzer for her story. Upon hearing about her receipt of the prestigious award, editors at the newspaper Toledo Blade (Cooke’s former employer) noticed inconsistencies in the biography of her that accompanied the prize-winning article. They contacted Washington Post editors and told them of the errors. Cooke admitted to her editors that she had indeed falsified
The veracity of “Jimmy’s World” was now in question. Initially, Cooke was adamant that the story was accurate. However, she soon admitted that she had fabricated the story. She resigned from The Washington Post on April 15, and her prize was rescinded by the Pulitzer committee. In a statement made upon resigning, Cooke conceded, “The [article] was a serious misrepresentation which I deeply regret. I apologize to my newspaper, my profession, the Pulitzer board and all seekers of the truth.”
In the aftermath of the discovery that Cooke had fabricated her prize-winning story, The Washington Post conducted a full-scale investigation of the debacle. Its findings and analysis suggested that Cooke’s ambition to succeed and advance at the newspaper had blinded her to her ethical and moral obligations to the newspaper and its readers. The findings of the investigation also suggested that the paper’s editorial staff was partially responsible in that they had become so entrenched in wanting stories that were contextually relevant to the evolving social and political agenda concerning drug use that they, too, had allowed their editorial judgment to be compromised.
Sociologists Craig Reinarman and Ceres Duskin, however, offered another explanation as to how one of the country’s most powerful newspapers published a fake story. In a 1998 journal article, Reinarman and Duskin maintained that a major aspect of the problem was journalistic beliefs and preconceptions about drugs and the nature of drug use. The authors wrote that in covering drug-related stories, the mass media had erred on the side of sensationalism by “rhetorically re-crafting worse cases into typical cases, and profoundly distorting the nature of drug problems in the interest of dramatic stories.”
Reinarman and Duskin supported their position by showing that there were certain key aspects of the case that should have led the editors of the paper to question the validity of the story. The sociologists argued that questions were not raised largely because the specific elements of the story fit rather nicely with dominant social assumptions about drug use and addiction. For instance, they noted that it should have been questionable that a five-year-old child would ask to have a needle stuck into his arms daily for the weeks that it would take the child to become addicted to heroin.
Reinarman and Duskin also stressed that it is unlikely that a journalist would have unlimited access to drug users and sellers and even more unlikely that an addict would allow a journalist to watch him or her shoot heroin into the arm of a young child. It would be unlikely as well that the typical mother, even the typical mother on heroin, would allow someone to shoot heroin into the arm of her child.
On a positive note, the affair led media outlets to revisit their standards for reporters and editors. It also intensified discussion of the rights of reporters to conceal facts about their sources.
-
Cooke, Janet. “Jimmy’s World.” The Washington Post, September 28, 1980. Cooke’s award-winning, but faked, feature story about Jimmy, an eight-year-old heroin addict living in Washington, D.C. -
Iggers, Jeremy. Good News, Bad News: Journalism Ethics and the Public Interest. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998. A study of journalistic ethics that also fully examines the Janet Cooke case and its significance for journalism. -
Maraniss, David A. “Post Reporter’s Pulitzer Prize Is Withdrawn.” The Washington Post, April 16, 1981. The newspaper article announcing that Cooke’s Pulitzer for best feature story had been withdrawn by the Pulitzer Prize Committee. -
Nemeth, Neil. News Ombudsmen in North America: Assessing an Experiment in Social Responsibility. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. Looks at the role of news ombudsmen in monitoring and checking the veracity of news stories. Examines the Janet Cooke case and who was responsible for the story. -
Reinarman, Craig, and Ceres Duskin. “Dominant Ideology and Drugs in the Media.” International Journal of Drug Policy 2, no. 1 (1992): 6-15. Provides a different explanation of how a fabricated story could be published by The Washington Post. Argues that preconceptions about drugs and drug users held by the news editors were factors that contributed to the decision to publish the story. -
Seitz, Don Carlos. Joseph Pulitzer: His Life and Letters. Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, 2004. Examines Joseph Pulitzer’s efforts to raise the standards of journalism, and his establishment of the Pulitzer Prize. Also looks at his beliefs about journalism and journalists’ responsibilities.
Australian Poets Claim Responsibility for a Literary Hoax
Clifford Irving Admits Faking Howard Hughes Memoirs
Pennsylvania Politician Kills Himself at Televised Press Conference
Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry Is Arrested for Drug Use
Physicist Publishes a Deliberately Fraudulent Article
Journalist Stephen Glass Is Exposed as a Fraud
Award-Winning Historian Joseph J. Ellis Is Accused of Lying
Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin Is Accused of Plagiarism
New York Times Reporter Jayson Blair Is Exposed as a Fraud
Washington Post Exposes Decline of Walter Reed Army Hospital