'Smoking Gun' shoots down drunkalog

Newswriting students (COM 209) please take note: There's a very nice bit of investigative work at a website called The Smoking Gun. I don't usually pay much attention to the site. They mostly run police mug shots of celebrities, and I'm not too interested in celebrities even before they run afoul of the law. But this week they published an investigation into a supposedly autobiographical best-seller by James Frey, who claims to be a recovering addict and whose gripping life story got him lots of favorable publicity on the Oprah Winfrey Show. In Alcoholics Anomymous, they call these stories "drunkalogs" (as in "travelog" and "monolog"). Frey's doesn't ring true.

Oprah and Frey's publisher are standing up for him him, at least so far. But The Smoking Gun discovered a lot of Frey's drunkalog is exaggerated at best and parts of it, well, look like outright lies. Some of the website's writing is a little over the top, IMHO, but the way they went about nailing down the story -- searching the records, talking to the cops and, last of all, talking to Frey -- is classical investigative reporting technique. The small-town police procedures ring true to my newspapering experience, too.

Here's how the investigation unfolded.

It was after the Oprah show aired that TSG first took a look at Frey. We had simply planned to track down one of his many mug shots and add it to our site's large collection. While Frey offers no specific details about when and where he was collared, the book does mention three states where he ran into trouble: Ohio, Michigan, and North Carolina. While nine of Frey's 14 reported arrests would have occurred when he was a minor, there still remained five cases for which a booking photo (not to mention police and court records) should have existed. ...

However, repeated dead ends on a county-by-county records search turned our one-off hunt for a mug shot into a more prolonged review of various portions of Frey's book. In an attempt to confirm or disprove his accounts, we examined matters for which there would likely be a paper trail at courthouses, police departments, or motor vehicle agencies.

What they came up with ... nothing, well, almost nothing. A few misdemeanor arrests, enough to convince them Frey did have a drinking problem. But nothing like the violent criminal record and hard-core drug addiction he claimed in his book.

Police reports, court records, interviews with law enforcement personnel, and other sources have put the lie to many key sections of Frey's book. The 36-year-old author, these documents and interviews show, wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms, and status as an outlaw 'wanted in three states.'

My favorite quote is from the cop who said, yeah, Frey's name did come up in a college drug investigation, but added, "We're not talking Detroit here. ... It's like Biffy and Buffy saying, 'I think we should steal a stop sign.'"

It's a developing story, one that raises real ethical issues. So far the best secondary account hasn't been in the U.S. but in the "Culture Vulture" blog in The Guardian, a British daily that is arguably the best English-language newspaper in the world. The comments are fascinating. Some, recovering addicts and alcoholics themselves, say if Frey is also lying about how he got sober (as appears increasingly likely), he's giving bad advice and endangering readers who suffer from those addictions. Others say there's always been a market for fiction, so what's the big deal? All are good examples of how web logs, or blogs, can enhance a newspaper's coverage and give readers a say on its pages.