Well, call it a victory for student journalists. The author of the famous (infamous) "monkeyfishing" article that Slate ran back in in 2001 -- a story that later proved to have serious accuracy/fabrication problems -- has now come completely clean and admitted he made the whole thing up. Jack Shafer, Slate's media critic and the editor on the piece, penned a column that says Jay Forman called him to confess. Forman was apparently motivated by a group of student journalists who had contacted him. Most people who followed the tale of Forman's* flawed story already viewed it as totally unreliable, but it's nice to have full confirmation. Follow the links in Shafer's piece below for all the details.
In 2001, Jay Forman wrote an article about "monkeyfishing" that I edited and published in Slate. Almost immediately, bloggers, the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto, and the New York Times ($) gouged huge holes in the piece.
At first, Forman defended his first-person story—which described a trip he'd taken with a "monkeyfisherman" to Florida's Lois Key—as completely true. In Forman's piece, a monkeyfisherman casts a fruit-baited fish line from his boat onto the island where rhesus research monkeys were kept. A monkey perched in a tree takes the bait. Caught, the monkey is dragged down into the water.
The withering Times and the Journal investigations caused Forman to change his story. He now said that he had fabricated the lurid parts about monkeys being caught with baited lines, but maintained that he had visited the island and taunted the monkeys from offshore.
The scandal rested there until this week, when Forman telephoned me. Student journalists writing a story about the incident had contacted Forman, and this had prompted him to call me and confess that the story was a complete lie. He never even visited the island...
*Correction: Jay Forman's last name was incorrectly spelled as "Froman" in this sentence. It was corrected on February 8. We regret the error.
