It all began to unravel with the whopper about the doctorate from the Sorbonne.
ABC reports that the TV network is reopening an investigation into former consultant Alexis Debat’s work. The impressively credentialed Debat had claimed to interview a journalist’s dream list of bold-name political stars:
Former President Bill Clinton, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan have added their names to the list of people who say they were the subjects of fake interviews published in a French foreign affairs journal under the name of Alexis Debat, a former ABC News consultant.
The French publication Politique Internationale had published dozens of articles under Debat’s byline, including a June 2007 interview with Barack Obama that the presidential candidate’s office is now saying never took place. The lies were uncovered by Rue 89, a terrific online journal.
What galls me is that it took so long for this guy to be outed. The ABC Blotter online reports earlier red flags:
In fact, Stephane Dujarric, the deputy communications director for the U.N. secretary-general, said he called the fabricated interview to the attention of the editor of the magazine, Patrick Wajsman, in June 2005.
“I told him that if he went ahead with it, we would denounce the interview as a fake,” the U.N. official said. “This was not some obscure guy. This was the sitting secretary-general of the U.N., and the magazine was told it was a fake,” he said.
The magazine’s editor, Patrick Wajsman, explains his inaction:
The magazine editor, Wajsman, told ABCNews.com he thought the problem with the Annan interview, one of the first he submitted, was “maybe a technical one” or a misunderstanding.
Now wait an eye-poppin’ minute. If someone called my boss and told him I had completely fabricated an interview with a VIP that ran in TIME, you can bet I’d be out on my butt before I could say boo. I suspect Debat’s golden credentials afforded him a shield of credibility that even his bosses didn’t want to crack. And yet–here’s the kicker–his creds were faked, too, as we learn from this New York Times piece by Bill Carter:
ABC fired Mr. Debat in June after discovering that his claims of having earned a doctorate from the Sorbonne were false. The network then investigated the reports Mr. Debat had participated in and found “they absolutely checked out,” Mr. Ross said.
This really makes me wonder. How many sterling careers are built on the backs of resumé lies? Or do we only hear about it when the lies belong to superstars?