PressEthic

For journalists, much bullshit is too much? That question has nothing to do with the accuracy of our reporting, the vetting of our sources or the scope of our investigations. It is easy for us to nail each other on mistakes in those areas. Perhaps we may more usefully put the question to ourselves not as journalists, but as writers.

David Callahan, in his book The Cheating Culture, maintains an alarmist's pitch throughout the book's 300 or so pages, as the author rolls out anecdotes and statistics about cheating in various professions and daily duties. After a while, a reader has to wonder whether he's not guilty of pumping the issue up at different points in order to make his work as a whole sound relevant.

For example, he laments the fact that ' "tens of thousands" of doctors' accepted payoffs from a drug company for prescribing a certain drug, and describes these same doctors amassing unquestioningly at a 'plush resort' for seminars hosted by the drug company to further promote its product. But might there be a context he's ignoring here, such as the fact that the ' "tens of thousands" 'of greedy doctors (a quote from a former salesman for the company turned whistle blower) could have been a collection of the lowest of the low in the profession? When confronted with a number that (while not very precise) seems quite high, I might have wondered, who were all these people? What do their peers think of them now? Callahan offers readers nothing in the way of comments from actual doctors on this issue, despite the fact that, for whatever this quality is worth in the face of cheating, medicine, like many other professions, is heavily peer-monitored.

But the problem isn't just the absence of both sides; it is more often the tone of the writing itself. Callahan obsesses over "ultra-competitive" people and places, from law firms to high schools, and packs examples of cheating from so many different fields of activity into each of his chapters that the overall atmosphere of the book is one of an inescapable problem that ought to be dogging everyone.

Callahan's sensationalism isn't terribly blatant, and he doesn't present himself as a muckraker, revealing new and shocking forms of corruption. He is a writer taking a morally high-minded approach to a problem he sees as urgent. Unfortunately, instead of offering evenly composed arguments for the seriousness of the problem, he presents half-formed facts that are supposed to dazzle readers with their unspoken implications. His use of induction is not just irresponsible, it's irritating.

Cheating is bad. Cheating is widespread. A collection of unfinished portraits of cheaters amounts to another example of it.