Ethics Newsline®

If you’re a parent or teacher, be warned: Raising kids just got harder. There’s a radical new defense of dishonesty in the air: the Frey-Did-It ploy. Soon to appear in classrooms or at dinner tables near you, its objective is clear. It seeks to justify prevarication, deceit, and what Tom Sawyer called “stretchers” by noting that best-selling authors, reputable publishers, and famous talk-show hosts see no problem describing fiction as truth.

The ploy grows out of a three-party relationship. James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces, started it by admitting that he fabricated key details in his best-selling memoir about addiction and recovery. His publisher, Doubleday, dismissed the incident and said it sees no reason to investigate. Oprah Winfrey, who puffed the book to stardom by picking it for her book club last September, called in to CNN’s “Larry King Live” during a January 11 interview with Frey to assert that the fabrication was “much ado about nothing” and that she continued to support the book because it “still resonates with me.”

How will this ploy operate in your neighborhood? It will start with a teenager, caught red-handed in an epistemological punt, excusing falsehoods by pointing out that the adult world condones the very things you propose to punish. Adults, you’ll be told, regularly spin, embellish, hide, misstate, and fabricate the truth — just like Frey. What’s more, adults — just like Oprah — happily defend, applaud, and reward prevaricators. Your ethical tightrope, as an adult, will be to recognize that many teens don’t operate this way, while admitting that some adults do — and then to mount powerful ethical arguments that they shouldn’t.

What are those arguments? Here are three that start with Frey’s words to Larry King.

In teenspeak, that translates into, “Well, what I told you was mostly the truth” or “My term paper was only 5 percent plagiarized.” But is 95 percent accuracy an acceptable standard? That means one in every twenty words is wrong. Which words? Are some of them the word not, as in “I did not do this”? Or are they sly little phrases like “I wasn’t there at all,” or “I never copied anything without a footnote”? If the referee at your football game, the mechanic who says your car needs new brakes, or the employer writing your paycheck spends 24 minutes each eight-hour day being utterly deceptive — and you don’t know which 24 minutes they were — are you OK with that? In fact, one reason we trust and respect others is because of their consistency. They may not do right all of the time, but we can count on them to try — and to tell us if they’ve failed. What we can’t tolerate is the sneaking duplicity that doesn’t even make an effort.

In teenspeak, that says, “How can you expect me to be accountable for little details?” In fact, the issues Frey misstated weren’t merely “subjective.” The investigative website The Smoking Gun, which nailed Frey for his fabrications, simply called the police in Granville, Ohio, to see whether Frey had, as he wrote, spent three months in jail after hitting an officer with his car. No such record: Instead, his front tire went over a curb, he was arrested for driving under the influence, and he was released without incident on a $733 bond. While writing his book, Frey could have made that same phone call. And three weeks from now, Frey and Larry King could consult a transcript rather than relying on their memories. We expect journalists, town tax officials, and real estate agents to check facts carefully rather than guessing about recollections. Judging from the outrage about the South Korean cloning fraud in this week’s news, we also expect scientists and their journals to get verifiable facts right.

In teen- (or Oprah-) speak, that means, “No big deal. Look, the essential truth is, this is my story, and I’m a good guy. So what if I messed around with chronology, or wrote my whole story before deciding whether it was fiction or fact?” What tanks that argument is that much of private life is based on personal memoirs. We’re writing them all the time. What do you say on your résumé? How do you describe your activities on time cards or in reports to your boss? What do you tell your spouse about why you were late? In public life, too, we expect Judge Samuel Alito not to fabricate his past. We want President Bush to rely on more than the “essential truth” that Saddam was up to no good. And if Jack Abramoff thinks he can conveniently misremember his past, fact-checkers will be all over him like a damp floor mop.

The point? The memoir genre is central to everyday life. The stories we tell one another create the culture in which we live. And because memoirs depend on accurate details, the Frey-Did-It standard is suspect on just about every intellectual, moral, and social ground. The public message sent by last week’s flap — that an easygoing tolerance for dishonesty is just fine — is one that parents and teachers should squelch wherever it appears.

©2006 Institute for Global Ethics