144 The unIvErSAl JournAlIst
forward matter of not letting the desire to get your byline on such stories overwhelm the simple precautions of asking questions and knocking on a few doors. Hoaxes are so much easier to perpetrate on reporters who never leave their offices.
The money paid for stories by some popular papers is so high (the Sun spends millions of pounds a year on payments to sources and freelances) that there have even been one or two people who earned a living as professional newspaper hoaxers. The best of them was probably a film stuntman called rocky ryan, alias Major Travis, Peter Bernstein, David oppenheimer, rocco Salvatore or one of the other false names he regularly used. He sold the People (a mass-market Sunday newspaper) a story about sex and drugs orgies among a Himalayan expedition, and to other media a tale that Gorbachev had resigned two years before he actually did (with the result that millions of dollars were lost on the foreign exchange markets), plus a story that top nazi Martin Bormann was alive and well and living on a kibbutz in Israel. none of them was true.
He also made $18,000 by concocting transcripts of a phone conversation between Prince charles and Princess Diana and then stung papers into paying for this. He got an actress friend to phone the People to say a friend in the security services wanted to talk about the royals. She gave a number in a smart part of london, and when the paper rang the telephone was answered by another friend who said he worked for British intelligence. He explained that they had been bugging Prince charles’s phone. He said he was prepared to sell the transcript of the phone conversation for $7,500. The People bought it, as did other papers. The reason they fell for it was that the hoaxers were giving them a story they wanted to believe was true – the art of the confidence trickster down the ages.
Journalism constructs momentarily arrested equilibriums and gives disorder an implied order. That is already two steps from reality.
Thomas Griffiths