‘When Journalism is Too Good to Be True,’ It Usually Isn’t: William Langewiesche Edition

William Langewiesche is one of the most admired
and honored journalists at work today. He writes for Vanity
Fair and, as his Wikipedia
page notes, “he was the national correspondent for The
Atlantic Monthly magazine where he was nominated for
eight consecutive National Magazine Awards” (he won two).

Yet as Miami Herald scribe (and Reason
contributor)
Glenn Garvin notes, Langewiesche is not above pulling fast ones
on the people he writes about. Garvin makes a strong case that this
sort of thing seriously undermines the media’s credibility.

In 2007, Langewiesche produced
a feature story about the oil company Chevron and its dealings
in Ecuador. Eventually, a lawyer named Steven Donziger won a court
case against Chevron in Ecuador. The company sued in New York to
keep U.S. courts from enforcing the award and as part of the trial,
huge amounts of emails were submitted into the record. Garvin picks
up the story:

Four years into the lawsuit, Donziger scored a public-relations
coup when he convinced the magazine Vanity Fair to do a long story
about the case. (Department of Extraordinary Coincidences:
Donziger’s wife at the time worked in corporate communications at
Condé Nast, the magazine’s publisher.)

Vanity Fair assigned the story to one of its best writers, the
award-winning William Langewiesche. The piece he produced was
extraordinarily sympathetic to the lawsuit, so much so that
Donziger himself proclaimed it “the kind of paradigm-shifting,
breakthrough article that I think is going to change the entire
case from here until it ends in a way that is favorable to us.”

And no wonder! The emails between Donziger and Langewiesche in
early 2007, as the story was being prepared, show Langewiesche as
Donziger’s camp follower at the best of times, his sock-puppet at
the worst.

The reporter asks Donziger to prepare lists of dozens of
questions to be asked of Chevron. And he begs Donziger to help him
prepare arguments about why there’s no need for him to do
face-to-face interviews with Chevron officials, as they’ve
requested, even though he spent days meeting with Donziger and his
legal staff.

“I want to avoid a meeting, simply because I do NOT have the
time. But I don’t want to go on record refusing a meeting,” writes
Langewiesche. “Perhaps I could say that my travel schedule is
intense…” He not only submits his emails to Chevron for
Donziger’s approval (“What say, Steve. I gotta send this tonight”)
and even lets him rewrite them. “Let me know if this works,”
Donziger says in a note returning one of them. “I was a little
aggressive in the editing.”

Garvin continues:

Not surprisingly, Langewiesche‘s story included some errors,
most whoppingly the assertion that it would cost $6 billion to
clean up all the pollution around oil-drilling sites in the
Amazon.

That estimate originally came from one of Donziger’s hired
experts. But the man had repudiated it a full year before the
Vanity Fair story appeared, warning Donziger in a letter that the
estimate was based on faulty assumptions and was “a ticking time
bomb which will come back to bite you, and very badly, if anyone
attempts due diligence on it.”

Garvin writes that he emailed Langewiesche asking for a response
but didn’t get a reply.

Note that Garvin isn’t making the case for some sort of
namby-pamby, both-sides-should-get-equal-treatment sort of
journalism. He’s pointing out that advocacy journalism that
masquerades as something approaching objective accounting should be
outed as such. Anyone reading through Garvin’s published work will
note that he’s got a point of view (in spades) but that doesn’t
preclude him from presenting all sides fairly. Not as morally
equivalent, but fairly. If a journalist becomes a partisan, I don’t
see anything wrong with that per se, though it often kills the sort
of critical edge that makes for good writing. But if you go
partisan and don’t cop to it, that crosses a line that readers
should know about.

Read Garvin’s Reason archive
here.