Ethically speaking, what do you think about Janet Cooke and her story
“Jimmy’s World. Read below.
Jimmy’s World
by Janet Cooke
September 28, 1980
Jimmy is 8 years old and a third-generation heroin addict, a precocious little boy with sandy hair, velvety brown
eyes and needle marks freckling the baby-smooth skin of his thin brown arms.
He nestles in a large, beige reclining chair in the living room of his comfortably furnished home in Southeast
Washington. There is an almost cherubic expression on his small, round face as he talks about life—clothes,
money, the Baltimore Orioles and heroin. He has been an addict since the age of 5.
His hands are clasped behind his head, fancy running shoes adorn his feet, and a striped Izod T-shirt hangs
over his thin frame. “Bad, ain’t it,” he boasts to a reporter visiting recently. “I got me six of these.”
Jimmy’s is a world of hard drugs, fast money and the good life he believes both can bring. Every day, junkies
casually buy heroin from Ron, his mother’s live-in-lover, in the dining room of Jimmy’s home. They “cook” it in
the kitchen and “fire up” in the bedrooms. And every day, Ron or someone else fires up Jimmy, plunging a
needle into his bony arm, sending the fourth grader into a hypnotic nod.
Jimmy prefers this atmosphere to school, where only one subject seems relevant to fulfilling his dreams. “I
want to have me a bad car and dress good and also have me a good place to live,” he says. “So, I pretty much
pay attention to math because I know I got to keep up when I finally get me something to sell.”
Jimmy wants to sell drugs, maybe even on the District’s meanest street, Condon Terrace SE, and some day
deal heroin, he says, “just like my man Ron.”
Ron, 27, and recently up from the South, was the one who first turned Jimmy on.”He’d be buggin’ me all the
time about what the shots were and what people was doin’ and one day he said, ‘When can I get off?’” Ron
says, leaning against a wall in a narcotic haze, his eyes half closed, yet piercing. “I said, ‘Well, s—, you can
have some now.’ I let him snort a little and, damn, the little dude really did get off.”
Six months later, Jimmy was hooked. “I felt like I was part of what was goin’ down,” he says. “I can’t really tell
you how it feel. You never done any? Sort of like them rides at King’s Dominion . . . like if you was to go on all of
them in one day.
“It be real different from herb (marijuana). That’s baby s—. Don’t nobody here hardly ever smoke no herb. You
can’t hardly get none right now anyway.”
Jimmy’s mother Andrea accepts her son’s habit as a fact of life, although she will not inject the child herself
and does not like to see others do it.
“I don’t really like to see him fire up,” she says. “But, you know, I think he would have got into it one day,
anyway. Everybody does. When you live in the ghetto, it’s all a matter of survival. If he wants to get away from
it when he’s older, then that’s his thing. But right now, things are better for us than they’ve ever been. . . . Drugs
and black folk been together for a very long time.”
JANET COOKE’S UNTOLD STORY
By Howard Kurtz
May 9, 1996
Janet Cooke, author of the most notorious journalistic hoax in modern history, is working in a Kalamazoo,
Mich., department store for $6 an hour.
Fifteen years after disappearing from public view, the former Washington Post reporter has resurfaced this
week to use one of her few remaining assets — her famous name — in an effort to revive her writing career.
Cooke won a 1981 Pulitzer Prize for a bogus story in The Post about an 8-year-old heroin addict named
“Jimmy,” then admitted after a lengthy interrogation that she had made it all up. Now 41 and divorced, she
contacted a onetime boyfriend, former Post reporter Mike Sager, to tell her story, and is appearing on
“Nightline” tomorrow.
“What I did was wrong,” Cooke told Sager for an article in the June issue of GQ magazine. “I regret that I did it.
I was guilty. I did it, and I’m sorry that I did it. I’m ashamed that I did it.”
But, she said, “I don’t think that in this particular case the punishment has fit the crime. I’ve lost my voice. I’ve
lost half of my life. I’m in a situation where cereal has become a viable dinner choice.
“It is my fault that I’ve never spoken up. But I’m a 41-year-old woman now. . . . If only people understood why
this really happened, maybe they’d have a different take on things. Maybe they’d think I wasn’t so evil.”
A dazzling woman who seemed on top of the world at 26, Cooke’s “pitiful tale,” as she put it, unfolded outside
the glare of publicity. She married an attorney after leaving The Post and moved to the Maryland suburbs, but
her attempts to write for Cosmopolitan and Washingtonian didn’t pan out. Cooke wound up behind the jewelry
counter at Bloomingdale’s, but when a news crew showed up, she quit.
The couple moved to Paris in 1985 but later divorced. Two years ago, with a plane ticket provided by her
mother, Cooke returned to her native Toledo. She worked at the Limited Express for $4.85 an hour, walking
miles home on some nights because she didn’t own a car, the GQ article says. Then she moved to Kalamazoo,
where she works at the Liz Claiborne boutique in Hudson’s department store. She suffers from asthma but
hasn’t seen a doctor because her part-time job doesn’t provide health benefits.
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“I think it’s unfortunate,” said Milton Coleman, who was city editor at the time and has just been named The
Post’s deputy managing editor. “I think she had talent. I would hope there would have been opportunities for
her to utilize that talent as a writer. The misfortune was that her very serious mistakes compounded some of
the mistakes of youth. . . . You always hope that people have opportunities to redeem themselves.”
Sager describes his former girlfriend as an accomplished liar from childhood and their romance as “a painful,
exhilarating psychodrama.” Cooke once called him to say she had swallowed a whole bottle of Valium, only to
admit it wasn’t true.
“It was one of those tumultuous affairs that was the best of times and the worst of times,” Sager said yesterday.
“I always felt she was a very damaged person.”
The article, he said, “was very difficult for her. We did hours and hours of interviews. She gained strength as
she went along.”
In Cooke’s account, her father, a Toledo Edison official, was a stern taskmaster who wouldn’t allow his wife or
daughters to buy so much as a skirt without his approval. They would make the purchases behind his back.
“The conclusion I’ve come to is that lying, from a very early age, was the best survival mechanism available,”
Cooke told Sager. “And I became very good at it. It was like, do you unleash the wrath of Dad’s temper, or do
you tell something that is not exactly true and be done with it?
“It is a very twisted way of thinking, I know. Believe me, I know. The problem becomes, what do you do when
your worldview is based on such a twisted proposition?”
The Post hired Cooke from the Toledo Blade on the strength of an inflated resume; it turned out she did not
speak French and Spanish fluently or graduate magna cum laude from Vassar. “My goal was to create
Supernigger,” she said. Cooke, a black reporter hired when many newspapers were pushing to recruit more
minorities, felt she had to outperform her white colleagues, according to the article.
In Cooke’s view, she did not invent “Jimmy” to win a Pulitzer or make a big splash; she was just desperate to
get off The Post’s Weekly staff, which she described as “the ghetto.” Cooke was also trying to get away from
her Weekly editor, whom she despised.
After an employee at a Howard University drug program told her an 8-year-old was being treated there, Cooke
mentioned it to Coleman, who declared it a front-page story and urged her to find the child. She could not.
“I kept hearing Milton telling me to offer total anonymity,” Cooke recalled. “At some point, it dawned on me that
I could simply make it all up. I just sat down and wrote it.”
Thus, in September 1980, was born the 2,200-word story of “a precocious little boy with sandy hair, velvety
brown eyes and needle marks freckling the baby-smooth skin of his thin brown arms.”
“Did we put pressure on her?” Coleman asked. “Did we contribute in that way? I would like to think that the
pressures on her were no different than the pressures that are always placed on reporters in a business that
seeks great stories. Most people don’t totally fabricate something in response.”
After the piece was published, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry said officials knew who Jimmy was and that he was in
treatment. Barry’s office later retracted the statement and the police called off a citywide search, calling the tale
a hoax.
Cooke, fearing exposure, developed insomnia and drank Jack Daniel’s or Dewar’s, according to GQ. After she
won the Pulitzer, Post editors learned of serious discrepancies in her resume. It took more than 11 hours of
grilling by several editors for her to admit that “Jimmy” was fiction.
The Post quickly returned the tarnished prize. An 18,000-word investigation by the ombudsman, Bill Green,
blamed several top editors, calling the episode “a complete systems failure.”
Sager says things might have been different if Cooke had flamed out in today’s media culture. Would she have
done Oprah and Geraldo, made the cover of People, starred in a made-for-TV movie? After all, Barry is mayor
again after being videotaped smoking crack; Richard Nixon was given a statesman’s funeral; Hugh Grant did
his mea culpa routine on late-night talk shows. Almost no one disappears in disgrace, as Janet Cooke did, her
name lingering as a cautionary tale in every journalism ethics course.
“She knows this is the only way she can get her life back,” Sager said. “Yeah, she’s destitute, and she doesn’t
like it. She folds sweaters. She sells retail. The bottom line is she’s a writer, and she couldn’t stand it anymore.
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“Writers are people who feel somehow inside that they’re special. That’s what it’s about. . . . I think there’s a
place for her. She’s got a lot to say now. She’s been through the wringer.”
Then respond to 1 & 2.
1.
If nothing else, Janet has talent. But, from an ethical standpoint as far as being a reporter is concerned, she
failed the people. She failed to do her due diligence when it came to actually research the story of the 8-yearold that was in the drug treatment program. As a reporter you take an oath to uphold the law, report stories that
are accurate and true and she did the complete opposite. I also feel like the company she was working for
when she reported the story of Jimmy is somewhat to blame as well. She came in the door lying. It was their
job, prior to welcoming her aboard, to make sure she was everything her resume said she was. However, they
didn’t. Her downfall, in a sense, was somewhat a reflection of the company she worked for.
Her response for the entire lie was pressure and although that’s not something that can be measured at this
point, it’s still no excuse for her making up such a thing. She even received accolades for a story that wasn’t
true. Personally, I think that maybe Janet has some deeper issues than what she initially let on for being her
reason of fabricating such a story. She has a track record of being a liar and although she has the potential to
be a great writer, she should also seek counseling. Anyone that can make up a story like that has to have
some other underlying issues.
Ultimately, I believe that Janet got what she deserved. They stripped her of her position and because of that
she ended up right where she didn’t want to be…”the ghetto.”
2.
Janet while being a great writer, is the example of learned behavior. Her story suggests that she comes from a
line of chronic liars. It was easier for her when she was little to lie about what she was doing or going to do in
order to avoid confrontation from her father. That behavior that was learned when she was little carried over to
her adult life.
However, what Janet did was a total defamation of ethical character. She was to report to the public the facts,
and she did the complete opposite. I know that the media tends to twist things for people to form a certain
opinion on the subject at hand, but to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her reporting, and to accept the award
was really disturbing to me. It takes someone that is in desperate need to be out of their situation.
In a way i feel bad for her but what she did was wrong on all accounts, but to come from where she has came
from, she just wanted a way out. She felt that there was no other option, and unfortunately her actions caused
her more grief than honor. Her story created issues for all of those involved, and I think she has been paid her
kharma.