Fagburn: A Personal Apology

I have written so many blogposts over the last year-and-a-half laying bare and polemicising against the errors and idiocies of other people far less talented than me. This time, I am laying bare and polemicising against the errors and idiocies of myself. If you demand high standards of others, you have to be just as damning when you fail to uphold them yourself.

I did two wrong and stupid things. Yes, that's right, just the two.

The first concerns some people I interviewed over the years. When I recorded and typed up these conversations, I found something odd: Despite my brilliant interview technique their answers were often boring and inarticulate. So I thought I'd do the decent thing and try and make them look better by making quotes up. Or nicking them from somewhere else. Did I do wrong?

Apparently I was wrong! No way!!! Time and time again I had begged colleagues at Fagburn Inc to tell me if a journalist making stuff up was bad practice. I realise now I should have begged a litttle louder.

The other thing I did wrong was that I edited the Wikipedia entries of anyone who'd ever crossed me. I have now come to realise that calling someone "A holocaust-denying convicted paedophile and hopeless old drunk" in a public forum breaches a basic ethical rule. I apologise to Mr Nelson Mandela unreservedly and totally.

After it emerged that I had done this, some defenders of the powerful people I had so bravely taken on time and time again, saw an opportunity to try to discredit the things I had made up about them. I can't blame them now for being so very childish and petty.

The worst part of this for me has been thinking about two things. The first was how to save my career. The second are the people here at Fagburn Inc, whom I have watched for the past eighteen months working phenomenally hard to get their stories right and to not tell lies. I am horrified to think that what I have done was the metaphorical equivalent of shitting in their and all the readers' faces. I am so terribly sorry.

But offering words of apology is not enough. As my mate Christopher "Hic" Hitchens once said to me: “Get us another gin and tonic - a large one."

Even though I stand by the blogpost which won the George Orwell Prize For Ethical Journalism ('Why We Must Not Ever Let Journalists Who Lie Off The Hook' Fagburn, Jan 2011), I am returning it, particularly now I've heard they're taking it back. Unfortunately, I cannot return the cheque as I have donated the money to my favourite charity, the Kentucky Home For Fried Chickens.

Second, I am going to take an unpaid leave of absence from Fagburn Inc, and at my own expense I will be undertaking a programme of journalism training. My rise in journalism has been so famously and fabulously meteroic I never had time to go on a course where they teach you making shit up and libelling people is wrong. Hopefully two weeks at The Copacabana Beachside School Of Journalistic Ethics will rectify this.

In my work, I’ve spent a lot of time dragging other people’s flaws into the light. I did it because I believe that every time you point out that somebody is going wrong, you give them a chance to get it right next time and so reduce the amount of wrongdoing in the world. And every time you don't, a fairy dies. Forgive me, I was just trying to make the world a better place.

That’s why I am grateful I have fucked-up so very spectacularly here. At the end of the day all of us will emerge from this as stronger and better people. Yes, even you.

I would like to apologise again to my readers, my colleagues and the people hurt by my actions. More importantly I would like to thank everyone at Fagburn Inc for ignoring the many, many warnings about me, and for letting me off with a slapped wrist when anyone else would have been told to sling their hook.

I know that some of you have lost faith in my otherwise brilliant - and award-winning! - work. I will do everything I can now to try and hold onto my job. I hope, after a brief period of retraining, you will give me the chance to do it all over again.

yours

Fagburn