From the WSJ Opinion Archives
BEST OF THE WEB
Slate's Monkeyshine
How a hoax was exposed.
(Editor's note: The following reports appeared in OpinionJournal's Best of the Web Today feature. Click on the date to read that day's full Best of the Web. External links were good at the time we posted the columns, but they often go bad after a while. We make no guarantees.)
Monkey
Business
Michael Kinsley, editor of Slate, is a very clever fellow, but he's always struck
us as somewhat unworldly. You know what we mean--the sort of guy who has a lot
of book learning but is short on street smarts. Well, it appears he has fallen
for an obvious hoax. Yesterday Slate published an article about a "monkeyfishing"
trip the author, Jay Forman, supposedly took in 1996. Forman claims he went to
"a horrible monkey-infested island called Lois Key" in Florida, where
"a pharmaceutical company had released a bunch of rhesus monkeys there and
left them to breed, thereby supplying research labs around the country with a
fresh supply of experimental test subjects." The monkeys "were miserable
there, howling and screeching and polluting the pristine waters with their feces."
This description of the island, unlikely as it is, actually is true, as this 1998 CNN story confirms. But Forman's account of his "monkeyfishing" expedition is preposterous:
Fruits were the bait of choice. . . . Once the bait was on the hook, I watched as the monkeyfisherman cast it onto the island, then waited. Not for long. The monkeys swarmed round the treat, and when the fisherman felt a strong tug he jerked the pole. I knew he had hooked one by the shriek it made--a primal yowl that set my hair on end. The monkey came flying from the trees, a juicy apple stapled to its palm.
He didn't actually land the monkey on the boat, since having a pissed-off, screeching monkey on the end of a hook running around a small skiff trying to bite you is the stuff of nightmares. He practiced a form of "catch and release." Monkeys can't really swim, but the water round the island was shallow. The line was cut and the monkey floundered back to await medical testing.
It turns out there actually is such a thing as "monkey fishing," and it did originate in the Sunshine State. This Southern glossary defines the term: "The illegal practice by Florida cracker commercial fishermen of either (1) using a battery and hand cranked generator to shock the fish to the surface or (2) dynamiting the water, like a depth charge, to send floating fish to the surface for scooping up." No primates, aside from the fishermen, are involved, though Jay Forman does seem to have made a monkey out of Mike Kinsley.
'Go Catch a Cockfight'
We heard from Jay Forman, author of the Slate
article on "monkeyfishing" that, as we noted
Friday, struck us as an obvious hoax. In his letter to us, Forman doesn't
deny the article is a hoax (though he does in a letter to Ken Sanes, linked
below). But he does take vigorous exception to our view that it's an obvious
hoax:
I am the author of the Slate article on Monkey Fishing which you criticized as being a "hoax" on June 8.
First off, you criticize Mike Kinsley, the editor of Slate, as being book smart but lacking "street smarts." Then, in your investigation of monkey fishing, you simply go to the "Southern Glossary" and look up the term monkey fishing. That seems to me a bit like the pot and the kettle. Also, when one must resort to semantic sleuthing, the "Southern Glossary" is hardly the OED.
You call the idea of fishing for monkeys "preposterous," but do not offer any argument as to why. You simply dismiss it with this one word. Do you believe that people are incapable of such a thing? The media is full of cruelties which people perpetuate upon each other every day, but when little monkeys or baby ducks or puppies get hurt, you seem to not want to believe this sort of thing can happen.
There is a big world outside of your cubicles. Go outside and take a walk around with your eyes open. Go catch a cockfight. Then write back and tell me this sort of thing is still "preposterous."
Meanwhile, the delightfully named Ken Sanes, who runs a Web site called Transparency Now, raises questions about two other Slate pieces in Forman's oeuvre, one on Forman's purported job in the pornography industry and the other on an ostensible night of drunken gunplay. Sanes notes that in the porn piece, Forman writes: "My specialty was writing booty letters to the magazine, which are, by the way, completely bogus." Either this is an admission that Forman has fabricated stories in the past, or it is itself a fabrication.
'Dog
Fishing in America'
We don't have to admit this, but we will: We were wrong about Jay Forman's Slate
article on "monkeyfishing." When we first
read it last week, we knew it was too outlandish to be true, but we thought
Forman at least deserved points for originality.
We're glad we never actually awarded those points, for the article turns out to be highly derivative. Yesterday we heard from reader V.J. Pappas, who remembered having read an article called "Dog Fishing in America" in National Lampoon, the great humor magazine of the 1970s. We were able to find a copy online, reprinted on the Lampoon's official Web site. The article by Gerald Sussman may involve a different animal, but the concept is the same:
"The Puerto Ricans started the whole dogfishing sport, you see," said Valdes. "You know why? Because of the dogsh--. The fa-ha, we called it. We couldn't walk in the streets for all the dog merde. We're clean people. It was those canines that made our streets dirty. So we bought some cheap fishing rods and used cuchifritos, that's fried pork stuff, for bait. We used to catch hundreds of dogs casting from the windows of our cars. We caught the newspaper dogs. You know, those cheap little mutts you see in the window of the pet shop on the cut-up newspapers. That's mostly the kind of dog my people could afford. You throw out your line and pretty soon, bow-wow, you got a newspaper dog. Then we drive like crazy to someplace like the East River and dump them. . . ."
Mark Simonson, who runs Mark's Very Large National Lampoon Site, tells us Sussman's article originally ran in the April 1976 issue of the magazine--predating Forman's treatment of the idea by more than a quarter-century.
This
Is More Fun Than a Barrel of Monkeys
It looks as if we've started something. Slate editor Michael Kinsley tells Inside.com
he's investigating the veracity of three stories written by Jay Forman, including
the piece
on "monkeyfishing" that we were the first to peg
as a hoax.
Kinsley sweetly gives his writer the benefit of the doubt. "The basic story is I don't think the monkey thing is going to be proven or disproven one way or another," he tells Inside.com's Seth Mnookin. (Mnookin wrote his article before we noted yesterday the Forman piece's similarity to a 1976 article on "dog fishing" in the humor magazine National Lampoon.) Instead, Kinsley is concentrating on Forman's first Slate piece, published in March, which recounts a purported night of drunken gunplay. In that article, Forman described how he and his friend Haim (Hebrew for "life") supposedly built a silencer:
The first stop was at a metal shop Haim had access to, where he used the drill press to vent the barrel in several locations. We then brought the gun back to his apartment to finish the job. We slid 10 large washers down along the barrel at even intervals and stuffed the spaces in between with alternating layers of steel wool and cotton wadding. Then we cut a length of PVC pipe and fitted it over the barrel like a sleeve, so that it sat atop the washers. We iced the whole package with duct tape, loaded the magazine with .22-caliber high-velocity LRs, and were good to go.
As Ken Sanes notes in his analysis of Forman's work, some Slate readers disputed the claim that such a silencer would work. On the other hand, Sanes also quotes two people "with familiarity with guns" who say they think the supposed silencer would work. Kinsley tells Mnookin: "The litmus test is the silencer. That can be nailed down. We're checking with gun experts now." Well, actually, it can be nailed down only if it turns out that the silencer story is impossible. If it turns out to be possible, that doesn't prove it's true--let alone that the rest of that article, and never mind the monkeyfishing article or the porn article--is true.
The New York Post, meanwhile, reports that one group is taking the monkeyfishing story very seriously: Animal-rights activists, the paper says, are "going ape": "Dozens of disgusted readers have fired off angry e-mails" about Forman's piece, reports the Post, which quotes Ingrid Newkirk, top dog at the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, as saying, "Whether it's true or not, I'm glad [Forman] raised the issue. He got people thinking." (This raises an old question: Is PETA a hoax?)
Reader Roger Firestone tips us off to the geek version of the mammal-fishing gag: "Squirrel Fishing: A new approach to rodent performance evaluation," a Web page, complete with photos, by Nikolas Gloy and Yasuhiro Endo, Harvard graduate students in engineering.
'Slate
Stands by Our Writer and His Stories'
Slate editor Michael Kinsley has completed his investigation of two of Jay Forman's
articles. His findings:
- On the "monkeyfishing" story, which we first disputed last week: "Slate's deputy editor, Jack Shafer, spoke to the friend Forman says was along on this expedition, who confirms Forman's description of it in every important detail except the year (the friend says it was 1996, not 1994)." Actually, Forman's article also says 1996, but that's a quibble.
- On the drunken-gunplay story: "Shafer talked with someone who saw the homemade silencer under construction and says there was no cotton batting but otherwise confirms Forman's description. Shafer described the device to the director of the U.S. Army Ordnance Museum, Jack Atwater, who said that such a device could work."
Conclusion: "Slate . . . stands by our writer and his stories. Nothing is ever the final word, but after several days of accusations, there is no evidence that he made this stuff up and lots of evidence that he didn't."
Fair enough. We stand by our skepticism. (So does Ken Sanes, who notes that "the first accusation . . . that one of these columns was a hoax came from Slate's own pages!") It remains our opinion that the monkeyfishing story is implausible on its face. But it's certainly fun, and we look forward to Forman's next contribution to Slate.
'Also in Fiction'
Oh, one more thing: Was this
article written by the same Jay Forman? Like the Slate piece, it's an account
of fishing off the coast of Florida (in this case near the panhandle rather
than the keys, and for fish rather than monkeys). Also, note the second link
in the right-hand margin under the heading ALSO IN FICTION: "Gone
Fishin' by Chris Suellentrop." Suellentrop--hmm, where have we heard
that name before?
Upstairs, Downstairs
Curiously, Kinsley doesn't say anything about attempting to check a third Forman
story, on his supposed job in the pornography industry. (He says only that
Seth
Mnookin's effort to debunk the story was inconclusive.) Perhaps this is
because it is the least outlandish of Forman's stories, but on the other hand,
it's also the easiest to check. Whereas wild sprees with buddies produce only
memories (if you're lucky), a yearlong span of employment should leave behind
documentation--pay stubs, W-2 forms and the like--that could be produced as
verification.
We did a little Web sleuthing on this story, based on the details Forman has provided, and our results were mixed. Forman says the porn publisher for which he worked, unnamed in the article, was located in midtown Manhattan, and that "the neighboring suite was the official consulate of Madagascar, whose office sported a fancy brass plaque that read 'Permanent Mission of Madagascar to the United States.' " He later told Sanes that he had worked for the porn magazine High Society.
The Web site of the Malagasy mission (to the United Nations, not the U.S., but that's a quibble) gives its address (as of 1998, contemporaneous with Forman's account) as 801 Second Avenue, Suite 404. According to this "resource list" for aspiring porn writers, High Society also had an office at 801 Second Avenue in 1998.
So far so good. But we also found an apparent inconsistency, in the following passage from the Forman piece (emphasis ours):
Early on, the bosses assigned me to pulling back issues from the vast pornography reserves the company maintained on the seventh floor. . . . Initially pulling magazines was a lot of fun, especially when I got to cart them back upstairs on an elevator chock full o' Madagascan diplomats, but over time it became just another work-related hassle.
The Malagasy mission was in Suite 404, which, unless 801 Second Avenue has a very peculiar office-numbering scheme, is on the fourth floor. Presumably High Society's "neighboring" suite was also on the fourth floor. So Forman was going "upstairs" from the seventh floor to the fourth?
'Implausible,
but Not Impossible'
Inside.com's Seth Mnookin reinterviews the only impartial source Slate editor
Michael Kinsley cited in his "less-than-exhaustive
examination of Jay Forman's columns," who, Kinsley claimed, confirmed
one aspect of Forman's drunken-gunplay
story. Mnookin writes:
On the subject of whether Forman could have manufactured a silencer (so he could shoot cocktail onions out of a bag in his living room, natch), Kinsley writes that Slate "described the device to the director of the U.S. Army Ordnance Museum, Jack Atwater, who said that such a device could work." (This is technically true; Atwater says he told a Slate editor that such a device could work. But, he adds: "When you fire a supersonic round, you hear a crack, like a bullwhip. So dampening down the noise of the round isn't going to do a lot of good. It would be a hell of a noise. This sounds to me implausible, but not impossible.")
It seems to us that there's a world of difference between "such a device could work" and "implausible, but not impossible." If Slate's only supposedly corroborating source (apart from two anonymous Forman friends) describes the story as "implausible," we must conclude that Kinsley was at best premature in deciding that Slate "stands by" Forman's work.
Mnookin also digs into Slate's archives and finds a 1998 story by Kinsley's deputy, Jack Shafer, who Mnookin says is Forman's editor at Slate and who Kinsley says conducted Slate's "investigation." Shafer was writing about Stephen Glass, who had just been fired from The New Republic after Forbes.com exposed one of his articles as a fabrication. (TNR subsequently investigated and found that at least 27 of Glass's 41 articles "contained at least some fabricated material.")
The Shafer article is rich in irony. "I'm embarrassed to confess that every Glass story passed my stink test when first published in the New Republic," he writes. Then he analyzes why so many readers, not to mention Glass's editors, fell for his frauds:
One final clue should have alerted us--readers and editors--to Glass' deception: Life is not so good that it places reporters at the center of action as frequently as it did the young Glass. And he wrote so well. Anyone can doubt a bad writer. It's the good ones who need watching.
This past December, Shafer wrote another piece after The New Yorker published an article called "My Fake Job" that turned out to include what Shafer called "Glassian fabrications." Shafer made fun of Peter Canby, The New Yorker's fact-checking chief, for having crowed about the Glass fiasco that "we would have smoked it out very quickly." Shafer exhorted Canby to "send his apologies" to TNR publisher Martin Peretz, whose address he helpfully provided.
The
21-Day Gap
Kinsley himself weighed in on Glassgate back in '98. In his "readme"
column on May 16 of that year, he noted that Slate had published a piece
by Glass (along with co-author Jonathan Chait, who is still at TNR). To our
knowledge, no one has alleged that Slate's Chait-Glass collaboration, titled
"Amazon.con," contained any fabrications. But this Kinsley comment
is priceless: "Rereading that article a few days ago, when the Glass story
broke, we were relieved to see that it does not contain the kind of long narrative
anecdotes that were Glass' specialty as a fiction writer." As we've seen,
Slate is not above publishing the occasional long narrative anecdote.
Here's what's really fascinating, though. We spotted Kinsley's article (which until now no one has specifically mentioned in connction with the Forman story) by using Slate's search function yesterday afternoon. We went back to find it again at about 2 a.m. today, and it wasn't there. We found the link atop this item by using the excellent search engine at Google.com.
After TNR finished its investigation of Glass, it removed his articles from its Web site. (TNR's editors explain their decision to do so here.) At first, though, the magazine did a pretty ineffective job of rewriting history. It simply cut all Glass stories out of the archive (tables of contents from past issues); Glass's articles remained on the site at their old locations, so those who'd saved the links could still find them. (Presumably they were also accessible through outside search engines.)
Apparently Shafer's 1998 piece originally contained some of the Glass links; the notes at the bottom of the piece now state: "We'd love to give you a gander at Glass' work, but the magazine appears to have removed his stories from its Web site after we posted their URLs here." Last September we caught Rep. Cynthia McKinney doing the same thing with an embarrassing press release questioning Al Gore's "Negro tolerance level"; sometime later the release disappeared from her site, though someone posted a copy on FreeRepublic.com.
In case Slate follows TNR's and McKinney's example and removes Kinsley's Glass column altogether, you can, for now at least, find it cached at Google.com. Naturally we've saved a copy to our hard drive as well. And in case Slate puts Kinsley's column back into its archive, we've reproduced here the page we got this morning when we searched Slate's archive for all "readme" columns. Scroll down to see the 21-day gap between No. 105 (May 23, 1998) and No. 106 (May 2, 1998).
Another amusing quote from Slate's archives may have some bearing on the present situation. In a 1999 "Chatterbox" column on the Clinton scandals, Timothy Noah wrote: "The coverup is worse than the crime when there is no crime. . . . When there is a crime, or a genuine scandal, it doesn't strike Chatterbox as axiomatic that it's in the perpetrator's best interest to come clean--even if the truth is bound to come out."
Stories About Stories
Reader Edward Lanza disputes our contention
yesterday that we found an inconsistency in Forman's porn
story:
It seems that you strain the text to conclude that an inconsistency exists. The way I read the article, Mr. Forman is saying that he went up to the seventh floor to retrieve old copies of the publication, and he had fun carting them back upstairs to the seventh floor in an elevator full of diplomats. This makes perfect sense if he was coming from the fourth floor--he would go upstairs to the seventh floor to get the issues and would go back upstairs to put them back after he concluded his "research." There is no discrepancy.
We'll concede that the text is ambiguous; it hadn't occurred to us that he might have meant he was going "back upstairs" to the archive rather than from it. But it still doesn't add up. If the Malagasy diplomats had their office on the fourth floor, why would the elevator be "chock full o' " them on higher stories?
Fish Are People Too
We heard from Paula Moore, a staff writer with the People for the Ethical Treatment
of Animals in Norfolk, Va., who elaborates PETA's position on "monkeyfishing":
Please allow me to respond to your June 13 piece about the recent furor over "monkeyfishing." Whether true or not, Jay Forman's tale of using fishing poles baited with fruit to catch monkeys on Lois Key has given some ordinary anglers food for thought. After all, there's really no difference between a monkfish and a monkey, except one can scream.
Fish experience fear and feel pain just as all animals do. According to Dr. Donald Broom, professor of animal welfare at Cambridge University, "The scientific literature is quite clear. Anatomically, physiologically and biologically, the pain system in fish is virtually the same as in birds and mammals." Adds Dr. Austin Williams, a U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service zoologist, fish "are sentient organisms, so of course they feel pain."
Fish cannot always express pain and suffering in ways that humans can easily recognize, but fishing is just as cruel as tossing a monkey an apple on a hook and then reeling him in. Whether you're talking about a perch or a primate, all animals treasure their lives and feel pain.
For more information, please visit PETA's Web site www.NoFishing.net.
Well, Ms. Moore, you make some good points, but how come you say nothing about the suffering of all the worms and flies that fisherman use when they catch fish? Is someone a little speciesist?
Ministry of Information
Slate returned Michael Kinsley's 1998
column on Stephen Glass to its archive
on Friday, hours after we noted
it had vanished. We'd love to hear Slate's explanation for its disappearance,
but we have a feeling Kinsley & Co. will be lying low for a while.
We'll
Be a Monkey's Uncle
The New York Times (link requires registration) thoroughly debunks Jay Forman's
June 7 "monkeyfishing"
story, which we identified
as a hoax the day after Mike Kinsley published it in Slate. Writes the Times'
Alex Kuczynski:
Though Mr. Forman defended his story, a friend, Marc Caputo, a reporter for The Palm Beach Post who accompanied Mr. Forman on the trip, said that the fisherman actually did not send his line flying up into the trees, that monkeys did not swarm around the fruit, that the fisherman did not succeed in catching any monkeys and no one cut any fishing lines. He said he had heard of monkey fishing only from one other person, a Key West fisherman.
And that fisherman, it turns out, acknowledges that he has a reputa
