“I did not want to fail,” the story of Janet Cooke

“I did not want to fail,” said Janet Cooke, a former American journalist who is best known for her fabricated story about an 8-year-old heroin addict, titled “Jimmy’s World.”

In 1980 Cooke was a 25-year-old Black reporter new to the Washington Post and anxious to make her way in a world of white reporters and editors. After being hired based on her impressive resume, Cooke began working in the “weeklies” section.

While Cooke had started at the Post only nine months earlier, she later stated that she “felt she had to outperform her white colleagues,” and reportedly wanted to escape the weeklies, which were essentially a training ground for new journalists and a “dumping ground for old relics on their way to retirement.”

The story originally came to Cooke after it was rumored that there was a young boy being treated for addiction in the Howard University Drug Program. Mentioning the child to Milton Coleman, the deputy managing editor at the time, Cooke was encouraged to find the child for a “front page story.”

After nearly two months of searching, Cooke had no luck and said she did not want to go back to her editor and say she couldn’t do it; “How was I supposed to justify my time?” she said in a later interview. While she was determined to create a story solely based on rumor, Cooke recalled Coleman telling her to grant anonymity to whomever she needed to — she had a realization, “at some point it just dawned on me that I could simply make it all up. I just sat down and wrote it.”

On September 28, 1980, the story about Jimmy, an 8-year-old heroin addict, was published with roughly 2,200 words, detailing a sandy haired little boy with velvety brown eyes and “needle marks freckling the baby smooth skin of his tiny brown arms.” The colorful piece included Jimmy’s mother, Andrea, her boyfriend, Ron, and the supply of heroin in their apartment, where strangers would come and go as they pleased, cooking up their afternoon fix.

“I can’t really tell you how it feel. You never done any? Sort of like them rides at King Dominion … like if you was to go on all of them in one day,” Cooke wrote, “quoting” Jimmy. The almost unbelievable story garnered attention from local authorities and the predominately Black community anxious to know where the Jimmy was — though the Post remained firm in its First Amendment rights, protecting both themselves and their reporter.

While many began to question the story’s veracity, it was submitted for a Pulitzer Prize after publication, which Cooke won and accepted — only to return two days later.

While Cooke remained adamant that her story was authentic, allegations of a falsified resume led to an eleventh-hour interrogation where Cooke eventually admitted that Jimmy, his family and the apartment were all fraudulent.
“There is no Jimmy and no family. I want to give the prize back,” Cooke said. “Jimmy is a composite.”

After the announcement of the Pulitzer, the Toledo Blade, Cooke’s former employer, prepared a quick story on the young writer. Only problem was that Cooke’s credentials did not match what was listed; while she had claimed to have graduated as valedictorian and Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar, studied at the Sorbonne, spoke French and Spanish and received a master’s degree in literature, the truth was Cooke had only studied at Vassar for a year before attending and graduating from the University of Toledo with only a bachelor’s degree.

Later, Cooke would state that from a young age she would lie to avoid her father’s controlling tendencies, saying she had become a habitual liar over time. “I always felt that she was a very damaged person,” said Mike Sager, Cooke’s former boyfriend and co-worker. Sager described their brief romance as a “painful exhilarating psychodrama.”

"The conclusion I've come to is that lying, from a very early age, was the best survival mechanism available," Cooke told Sager in a GQ article fifteen years later. "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 was said that Cooke’s father had instilled a strict philosophy: “Because you’re a girl, because you’re black, you must do anything twice as well as anybody else. There is no room for screwing up. Even if you’re better, you will never be considered the best.”

As a child Cooke was drilled for excellence and was appalled when she began attending the public elementary school where none of the other Black children could read. “Her father explained, ‘These children really can’t be your playmates; they are not intellectual enough or well-bread enough for you.’”

While the characters in “Jimmy’s World” were all concocted from Cooke’s imagination, the story did portray a very real problem in D.C. at the time — new strains of heroin across the city and the impact of drugs on kids and adolescents growing up in poverty.

“It was unfair that she won the Pulitzer Prize but also unfair that she didn’t win the Nobel Prize for literature,” said Gabriel García Márquez, a Colombian novelist, short story writer and journalist. Agreeing with the sentiment, Lori Lizarraga, a young Latina journalist from Texas, said, “What’s unfortunate is that she didn’t know that the sky is the limit for a good writer.”

Only a year after the ordeal in 1982, Cooke appeared on the Phil Donahue show and stated that her goal with inflating her resume was to create a “Supernigger,” which was her personalized term for a “prize winning Ivy League educated Black reporter irresistible to white editors.”

Cooke admitted that she fabricated the characters and knew her life as a journalist was over once word got out that she had won the Pulitzer. She also stated that over the course of writing “Jimmy’s World,” her editors never pressured her to divulge information and in fact at one point told her that it was better that they didn’t know.

While it is a journalist’s responsibility to account for all the facts, “it is the responsibility of the newsroom to make sure that we succeed, to train us, to impart wisdom on us, to make sure that we are getting a leg up, to make sure that we are feeling supported and empowered and capable of the job that we are so capable of doing,” Lizarraga said.

"Certainly, there is an undercurrent of this kind of competitiveness and of the need to be first, be flashiest, be sensational," Cooke said in 1982. "And I think that there is more of it in a place like the Post."

At the time the Post was comprised of well-known editors including Ben Bradley and Bob Woodward, among others. “After the Cooke affair, something very fundamental began to shift in the Post’s and other newsrooms — previously there was a tendency to trust your reporters,” said Donald E. Graham, former publisher of the Post.  

“Did we put pressure on her?” Coleman is quoted in a Post article, “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,” he said. “Most people don’t totally fabricate something in response.”

The Post’s editors weren’t the only ones who originally stood by Cooke; after the piece was published, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry released a statement that city officials knew where Jimmy was and that he was in treatment. Barry’s office later retracted the statement as word caught on that the story may have been a hoax.

“The pressure is a real thing, and I won’t discount that,” Lizarraga said of the industry, but “there are too many real stories to be telling — truth is stranger than fiction.”

As a broadcast journalist Lizarraga goes on to state that there is a big difference between being in the field and being behind the desk assigning stories, and that as journalists we’re sometimes forced to check a box based on what our editors want. “Unfortunately, we’re feeding right into what people think about the media, which is that we’re going to make it fit, square peg, round hole, it doesn’t matter, we’re going to jam it in there,” she said.

Similar to other stories like Sabrina Erdely’s “A Rape on Campus” piece and the saga of Stephen Glass’ fraudulent writing career, it’s evident that in an industry where competition is intense, it’s easy to succumb to confirmation bias and what we want to badly to accomplish, no matter the consequences.

“The fear of failure is strong,” said Chris Gallegos, a freelance magazine writer, former reporter and producer for KOA radio, Meteo Networks, and ABC radio. “I can only imagine in 1980 as a Black woman in a prestigious position at a newspaper like that, the fear of failure had to be crippling,” he said. “While I don’t condone it — I at least can understand why she felt she had to fudge her credentials.”

Many journalists since will not be known for their talent or storytelling abilities but for their mistakes surrounding the fundamental ethical dilemmas of journalism. Jayson Blair was noted as a talented writer until it was discovered that he plagiarized and fabricated information for dozens of articles, an ordeal that resulted in not only Blair but his editors being forced out of the New York Times. Brian Williams continuously embellished the story of when he was in a helicopter in Iraq. Columnist Armstrong Williams reportedly accepted a large payout to write about specific subjects benefiting the Department of Education; former Boulder reporter April Morganroth fabricated quotes for a 9/11 anniversary story after her 20-year career in the field — the list is long.

“Part of ethics is, ‘What’s your goal? what are you trying to accomplish?’ We know what she [Cooke] was trying to accomplish; she was trying to tell a good story,” Gallegos said.  

“I do feel bad that she felt that kind of pressure and felt that she couldn’t speak to her editors, and ask for [guidance and] suggestions,” said Rachel Lorenz, a freelance journalist and student at MSU Denver. “We would think that part of [an editor’s] job is to create relationships with your reporters so they can come to you.”

Cooke’s actions would go on to change the relationship between editor and reporter, anonymity etiquette and the ways in which the public views the media. Today’s standard reflects that, in the case of granted anonymity, both reporter and editor understand who the source is, even if the person is not to be revealed to anyone else.

“As it happened, the organization pushed a flawed person into [something she couldn’t handle],” said Walt Harrington, a former Post staff writer, editor and colleague of Cooke. “It’s like taking a person who’s weak and encouraging them to do something that they’re not equipped to resist. But at the same time, any system should be thoughtful about that kind of person.”

Harrington’s perspective is not only reflective of journalism and the high-pressure environment but also our inherently flawed system. Cooke was a Black female journalist desperately trying to prove herself in a world of predominately white men. As journalists working within the media, there are underlying and inescapable challenges that we must surpass to be considered trustworthy and deserving of your story, and in this case that’s in addition to being a woman of color.

Seemingly Cooke’s only options for her award-winning story were to “make it work or make it up,” Lizarraga said. As she was clearly a talented writer, the unfortunate truth is that if it weren’t for this chronicle of bad decisions, she could have gone on to be an accomplished journalist.

“I think it’s unfortunate,” Coleman said of the incident, “I think she had talent. I would hope there would be opportunity to utilize that talent as a writer. The misfortune was that her very serious mistakes compounded some of the mistakes of youth.”

Nevertheless, once those mistakes are made, your career as a journalist is over. “Because journalists don’t have much to call their own— there only real currency is credibility,” said Conrad Swanson of the Denver Post. “I’d hate to immediately lean on the ‘if you can’t handle the heat get out of the kitchen’ argument because that assumes this industry has realistic and healthy expectations of journalists. It doesn’t.”

While the industry of journalism will continue to evolve, the basic ethical standards remain; seek the truth, minimize harm, be accountable and act independently. These guidelines encompass what it means to remain faithful to the truth and to our readers — even if that means admitting defeat.

“I’d rather quit and find a new profession than to fabricate a story, source or quote and ruin the credibility I’ve earned during my career,” Swanson said.  

In 1996, fifteen years later, Cooke initiated what would be her most in-depth string of interviews with longtime friend and ex-boyfriend Sager. “What I did was wrong. 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 told Sager, “I don’t think in this particular case the punishment fits the crime.”

“Janet’s World,” originally published in GQ and later as a book in 2013, is based on months of intensive interviews both in person and by phone with Cooke and Sager. The story tells of “the human behind the headlines; the difficult journey of a young Black woman from Toledo, Ohio, and her struggle to succeed in a profession historically dominated by white males.”

Since the publication of the article Cooke and Sager sold the movie rights to her story for $1.6 million. Cooke said, “The most miserable part of my exile has been the lack of a forum, the lack of a voice.”