Yale Daily News Publishes Bizarre, Extremely Misleading Fact-Check of Former Reporter
On Sunday morning, the Yale Daily News published an involved fact-check of former reporter (and fired WSJ intern) Liane Membis ’12, raising many new questions about the veracity of Membis’s reporting, the paper’s ethical standards, and the leadership of embattled editor-in-chief Max de la Bruyère.
Focusing on Membis’s “reported pieces,” de la Bruyère mostly describes errors like quote-changing and creative paraphrasing. In the last two paragraphs, however, he discusses a 2009 article in which Membis brags about the “expensive meals,” “liquor,” and “hotel accommodations” she accepted from her “sugar daddy”: an older, married manager at an unpaid summer internship.
He reports that Membis “offered the News different stories about the story’s authenticity”:
In an Aug. 31, 2009 email, she said, “My story is not exaggerated, so no correction is needed.” But in a March 2, 2011 email, she wrote, “The piece … was originally written under the pretense of it being a fictional piece by the Scene staff; it was edited without my presence and published in the fall of 2009, with exaggerations which were not true.”
de la Bruyère leaves a laundry list of questions unanswered. Among them: why are her statements in 2009 and 2011 so contradictory, and what occasioned them in the first place? Which “exaggerations” is she referring to? If the article is exaggerated, why was it corrected only a few days ago? Under which context did Membis actually write this article? And most importantly: is what she wrote true?
Membis asserts that, in a bid to shock readers with suggestions of a married man’s infidelity, News staffers rewrote her article without her knowledge. So, is that true? May News staffers alter a writer’s work in that way? de la Bruyère simply doesn’t answer any of these obvious questions.
This is irresponsible: these questions are checkable, and—given Membis’s lack of cooperation—checkable only by the Yale Daily News, and perhaps only by de la Bruyère himself. And yet, apparently, they have not been checked. In an article otherwise characterized by tedious detail, de la Bruyère obscures crucial information about Membis’s most controversial work.
Curiously, this is not the first time a News staffer has withheld relevant information about Liane Membis.
One 2011 profile, written by a former staff columnist for the paper, omits the summer of 2009—the same summer to which her “sugar daddy” article alludes—as if it never happened:
Although she started out writing for The Yale Daily News [in 2008] … [Membis] realized that she wanted to challenge herself beyond the limits of a campus publication. So she took the initiative to look for opportunities outside of Yale, beginning as an intern and then freelance writer for CNN….
Membis did not, in fact, begin her non-Yale journalism career at CNN. Membis spent the summer of 2009 as an editorial intern at the Boys and Girls Club of Metro Atlanta, for whose website she conducted interviews and wrote articles. (She began interning at CNN a year later.)
Why would this be omitted? It’s not like this internship is somehow embarrassing in itself; nor would it appear misplaced on Membis’s CV. It totally fits into Membis’s other work. In a scarily comprehensive profile—one that checks every last bullet on Membis’s resume—this elision is almost certainly deliberate.
The question here is not why Membis would want to hide this period of her life. The question is why News staffers have twice cooperated in concealing it.
Which brings us back to Max de la Bruyère’s fact-check. He acknowledges the disputed truth of Membis’s “sugar daddy” article without bothering to verify any of its claims, or those pertaining to its editing and possible exaggeration.
Why? Seriously, why? If that’s not his duty, then what exactly is his duty? If this doesn’t merit investigation, then what on earth does?
This unwillingness has become something of a pattern for the News‘s editor-in-chief. In July, de la Bruyère refused to actually review Membis’s work at the News, declaring that he and his staff had found no evidence of fabrication. (There definitely was.) And in November 2011, he forbade reporters from investigating—not reporting, but simply investigating—the informal charges brought against Patrick Witt, thus falling, as the Poynter Institute argued at the time, “far short” of the the paper’s duty.
