Fail Up

by Tavis Smiley

  The show wasn’t canceled. No doubt, the decision had something to do with the thousands of calls, e-mails, and faxes that flooded ABC and CompUSA. Enraged Black folks all across the country shut down ABC Radio’s phone system that day in New York and CompUSA’s phones in Dallas.

  The ABC Radio standoff convinced CompUSA’s executives that we were committed to the cause. The following week, the company called for a meeting. A few weeks later, it had hired a Black- and Hispanic-owned agency and made a multimilliondollar commitment to advertise in Black and Hispanic media markets. CompUSA’s then Chairman, Jim Halperin, came on my radio program. Although he maintained that his company never engaged in “no urban dictate,” Halperin apologized to our audience for not aggressively reaching out more to all customers.

  Further, Halperin appealed to other CEOs, asking that they never underestimate the power or the value of minority consumers: “It’s a shame this took us off track for a while. I want to sell computers to anyone who walks in the door.”

  Ironically, just when we were settling our dispute with CompUSA, the company was acquired by a Mexican corporation. Executives at the company, who had dismissed the Hispanic market for years, wound up answering to Hispanic leadership.

  Life can be funny that way.

  A Huge Price to Pay

  In the end, everything worked out. But that doesn’t erase the fact that I put my credibility on the line, and my failure to do my homework could have torpedoed a very powerful advocacy campaign.

  That was almost 15 years ago. Today, because the Internet can amplify our slipups exponentially, sloppy mistakes can not only end your career; they can destroy the professional and personal lives of many others as well.

  Remember Jayson Blair, The New York Times reporter who was disgraced in 2003 after it was discovered he had plagiarized work and made up stories and quotes? Blair, when asked by his editors to produce travel receipts for a story-related trip, quickly resigned with a brief apology for his “lapse in journalistic integrity.” But even with his departure, the scandal grew; in-house investigations ensued and reputations were ruined. The Blair scandal led to the resignations of the Times Executive Editor, Howell Raines, and its first Black metropolitan editor and managing editor, Gerald Boyd. Although some Times officials blamed Blair’s ruse on their desire to help an affirmative action candidate succeed, ultimately there was no reasonable excuse for the editors who failed to fact check Blair’s plagiarized or fabricated stories—numbering at least three dozen—between 2002 and 2003.

  “Rick Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times journalist, also resigned after accusations arose that an article published under his byline and datelined Apalachicola, Florida was based on the experiences of and interviews conducted by a freelancer. Bragg claimed this practice was routine procedure at the newspaper.”

  There’s also no excuse for NAACP and White House officials and dozens of journalists who rushed to judge a dedicated and innocent professional who wound up defamed and forced out of a prestigious government job.

  In June 2010, conservative Website publisher Andrew Breitbart posted an excerpt of a speech delivered by Shirley Sherrod, a Black U.S. agriculture official. The heavily edited video gave the impression that Sherrod was a racist. The post became “breaking news” on FOX and other news networks. The NAACP quickly repudiated Sherrod, defining her words as “shameful, intolerable, and racist,” even though she was speaking at an official NAACP event.

  In less than 24 hours after Breitbart’s incendiary post, truth came to light. In the full video, Sherrod actually explains how she came to grips with her own biases and learned to help poor people (“Black, white, and Hispanic”) who were denied access.

  In fact, the farmer that she allegedly discriminated against came to her immediate defense on national television. The day after Breitbart released his tape, Roger Spooner—the “white farmer” Sherrod supposedly discriminated against—appeared with his wife Eloise on CNN’s Rick’s List. They called those smearing Sherrod “racists” who “don’t know what they’re talking about.” The Spooners said Sherrod did “her level best” to help them save their farm, which she ultimately did.

  The urge to use the Internet to skirt hard work is increasingly prevalent on college campuses. To stem the growing trend, dozens of online detectors such as Plagiarism.org and turnitin.com have been created and employed in academic circles. But young people are innovative and technology is accommodating. Just as there are programs designed to detect plagiarism, sophisticated software has been developed to help plagiarize.

  The problem in an increasingly technological society is that we can unknowingly create lies and distortions at a tremendous cost. As Rush Limbaugh’s case illustrated, it’s easier than ever to access information, but it’s also easier to broadcast inaccurate information.

  The way news travels at light speed these days, anybody can be bamboozled, run amok, or led astray. It happens all the time. If you say the wrong thing and it’s discovered, it can reflect badly on you and, with the Internet, that bad reflection can be on display for an eternity.

  It’s not just media people. If the White House with all its resources and the venerable NAACP can get tripped up, so can the average Joe. Whoever you are and whatever you do, it’s important to think about the consequences of slipshod work.

  We have to check ourselves before we wreck ourselves. Don’t let laziness or irrational exuberance burn you. My situation with CompUSA involved both. But it taught me a critical lesson about doing my homework. There is no substitute for diligence and double checking all the facts. Developing the discrimination necessary to avoid taking everything at face value and promptly acknowledging and correcting mistakes publicly are equally essential skills.

  Believe me; I work hard every day to make sure I’m not sidelined by inadequate preparation. In today’s media landscape, there’s no guarantee that you can bounce back from the backfire of hasty or ill-conceived work. Just ask Dan Rather. “Do your homework” is not just a motto. It’s also a lesson for survival.

  CHAPTER 9

  LOOSE LIPS CAN SINK SHIPS

  We were very, very young and very much into each other. She was well known in Hollywood circles and I was an up-and-coming assistant to Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley. This story is a tad intimate, but the details are necessary.

  To put it delicately, in the afterglow of amore, we mused about our past lovers—contrasting their virtues, peccadilloes, and hang-ups. She revealed details about a former lover’s sexual proclivities. There was no malicious intent; it was just innocent pillow talk—at least it was supposed to be.

  I’m not going to give the man’s name. Let’s just say he is very bankable in Hollywood. In fact, he’s the sort of guy I would love to have interviewed in my later years and gotten to know better. Unfortunately, as this story will illustrate, that will never happen.

  Fast-forward a few months after the bedroom conversation; I was hanging out with a few of my buddies. As testosterone-burdened males often do, we were engaged in braggadocious, bawdy locker-room one-upmanship. Well, in the midst of this unbridled raunchiness, the name of my girlfriend’s ex-lover surfaced. Being the absolute Neanderthal that I was then, I chimed in: “Well, I heard this about him and I heard that … ” and I proceeded to discuss the guy’s sexual secrets.

  Unbeknownst to me, someone in that group was also a friend of the man I was disparaging. When he repeated the exact details that I had shared—the ex was no dummy. He knew exactly who had spread the information. He called my girlfriend, gave her an earful, and told her that she needed to keep her mouth shut about his business.

  Needless to say, my girlfriend went totally off on me. The breach led to our eventual breakup. I cared about her deeply. The tragedy of this story is that my indiscretion severed one promising relationship and prohibited another from ever getting started. What’s ironic is that her former lover and I would have gotten along famously, I’m told. In fact we share mutual friends
.

  To this day, Mister X will not come on my show. He’s never expressed a reason why, but I know. Twenty years have passed, and all I can say is that I still feel incredibly small about that unfortunate incident.

  I remember being down on myself and telling Big Mama the whole story. Being totally embedded in truth, she said my girlfriend and her former lover had every right to be upset with me. I had no business running my mouth about their business. “Let this be a lesson to you,” she said. To accentuate her point, she shared a classic Big Mama witticism:

  “Baby, there’s 24 hours in the day—12 hours to mind your own business and 12 hours to leave other folks’ business alone.”

  In Other Folks’ Business 24/7

  Rumormongering is as old as the art of communication. But in contemporary society, gossip—as a tentacle of the world’s most powerful source of communication—has become a blood sport. As an article in The Christian Science Monitor a few years ago pointed out, the rumor mill is abuzz with chit-chat about “celebrity slipups and the personal misdeeds of government officials.” With the Internet, such chit-chat has increasingly become a gross invasion of privacy for voyeuristic satisfaction and financial compensation. You don’t have to be famous or accomplished; just have an affair with someone who is.

  The man I badmouthed is a noted personality. Two decades later, I am now considered a personality, subject to rumormongering and blogosphere gossip. Now I’m on the other side where people constantly run their mouths and blog rumors about my personal life, thoughts, and motivations as if they really know me. Today, I really understand how that gentleman must have felt all those years ago.

  Don’t get me wrong. Every morning I take my “big boy” pill. Yet increasingly, I find myself reflecting on that long-ago incident and how much easier and more damaging it is these days when people run their mouths and dine on other folks’ business.

  Several celebrities I’ve interviewed over the years swear that they never read anything about themselves on the Internet. For a long time, I didn’t think they were being totally honest on this count. As I became better known, I read everything that was written about me. I now understand. If you take in that garbage on a continuous basis, it becomes toxic. You find yourself getting emotional, angry, and tempted to respond, which—and let’s be honest—is exactly what the professional antagonists really want.

  This is not to say that some celebrities, by their antics, don’t invite speculation and gossip. They do. But people outside the public eye don’t really understand that well-known folks are real people, too. It’s not easy grappling with the surreal feeling of impotence and vulnerability when constantly caught up in swirls of rumor, innuendo, and gossip without any effective recourse.

  Existing in the spotlight means you have to adjust to the glare. It took me awhile to adapt, but I don’t pay that much attention to what’s said about me online. I’m surrounded by people whose job it is to protect and grow the brand. They are always aware of what’s being written or said about me, and they let me know when I should pay attention.

  That works just fine for me.

  But this chapter isn’t really about celebrities or me. It’s about something much more dangerous.

  Clear and Present Danger

  My experience 20 years ago was added to this book to help me tackle a larger concern, one that has my head and my heart in conflict. In general, I believe that technology is a force for the greater good because it provides unprecedented access to information, education, and entertainment. No one can dispute how much it has leveled the playing field. But, like the atom bomb, stem cell research, or any other scientific advancement, there’s that duality of good intention versus out-of-control application. Because so much amplified, unchecked, unfiltered negativity comes through the Internet, many critics identify it as the most powerful and influential mechanism of instability in our society.

  Imagine if the rumor I started with a group of guys a generation ago was posted in some sleazy, sensationalized online news story. Imagine if my boys had dispatched my gossip to the blogosphere. Deeply private matters made public. Whoa! It could have driven someone to drastic measures.

  That’s what happened to 18-year-old Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi. In 2010, two students allegedly spied on him and broadcasted from a Webcam (and later on the iChat network) an intimate encounter of Clementi with another man. When Clementi learned of this public outing, he leapt to his death from a New York bridge.

  Much of the sheer hatred aimed at President Obama can be attributed to the rumor that he’s a Muslim. A 2010 Pew Research Center poll suggested that one in five Americans believes the rumor is true. “The rumor itself isn’t new,” Doug Bernard wrote in a VOANews.com article, “… but it has been spreading rapidly lately—due in large measure to the Internet.”

  A few days after an earthquake devastated Haiti, a rumor spread across the entire nation that a massive earthquake was soon to hit Ghana; it caused major panic and sent thousands of Ghanaians running into the streets. The rumor was spread mostly by mobile phones. Jenna Burrell, assistant professor in the School of Information at UC-Berkeley, cites this incident as an example of the Internet’s ubiquitous power to stir mass emotion.

  Starbucks, the coffee company, still finds itself warding off rumors that it didn’t support the war in Iraq or anyone who fought in it. The myth started with an e-mail sent to friends by a Marine sergeant. In his note, he complained that Starbucks denied free coffee to U.S. soldiers in Iraq because they disapproved of the war. The complaint went viral and became fact in the minds of many. Even though the soldier later recanted his claim and sent another e-mail apologizing for his misrepresentation of Starbucks, he couldn’t dilute the impact of his original missive.

  Today, thanks to the World Wide Web, it’s easy to spread false, misleading, and dangerous rumors. And entertainers and politicians aren’t the only targets; be you teacher, bus driver, baker, or candlestick maker—doesn’t matter, we’re all fair game.

  Ever heard of spokeo.com? Well, chances are it’s heard of you. The new online USA phone book lists personal information aggregated from online and offline sources that can let total strangers know almost everything about you. Type in your name, e-mail address, or phone number, and photos you might have posted on social network sites appear. The Website offers pictures of your house and street, your credit score, income, age, occupation, and other information you may want to keep personal.

  That old truism, “nothing spreads like word of mouth,” has become obsolete. The Internet is now word of mouth—on steroids. Technology has accelerated the power to inform, misinform, and destroy a zillion times faster than words we let slip between our lips.

  Until It Happens to You

  We’re all part of the problem. When we read something negative about someone else online and forward it to our list of friends, contacts, and social networks, we’re all guilty. We’re all voyeurs, contributing to the cultural instability, societal decay, and the Web-speed ugliness that’s infecting America.

  To some, it’s a small price to pay for the reward of global interactivity. For others, it’s much ado about nothing; gossip is part of our DNA. Sociologists say gossiping is a way for people to feel important, bond in social circles, stay in-the-know, and clarify positions. According to a 2010 study by the Social Issues Research Center (SIRC), two-thirds of all conversation is gossip. The study’s authors also referenced other research that found gossip accounts for 55 percent of men’s conversation time and 67 percent of women’s.

  It’s what we do and who we are. I get it.

  We live in a brash, totally indiscriminant culture where venting our spleen in public is fodder for a hit reality show or perhaps ten minutes of fame as an agitated guest on Jerry Springer or Maury or some other knock-down, beat-down, sensationalized, low-brow TV show. You can’t even stand in a checkout line without being bombarded by headlines on sleazy tabloids gossiping about extramarital or homosexual affairs,
celebrity weight gain or loss, or a vulture-type story of a near-death notable.

  As fun as it can be for creative types, YouTube can also be used to anonymously but virally slash someone you don’t like or desire to humiliate for chuckles. Why not? Millions are tuned in anyway just waiting for that hilariously funny homemade video that makes a fool out of somebody … anybody.

  The privacy lane has been unbelievably cluttered with postings of opinions as facts and live feeds from bookstores, hotels, hospitals, businesses, and local girls and guys’ “gone wild” parties. We function in a society where it’s actually cool to hang folks and businesses upside down on the cross via the Internet.

  There is no Internet FCC as a constant monitoring and regulatory authority. An offensive video might have had a million hits by the time you realize you’ve been slandered online. The immediate consequence of an improper or inaccurate video posting is usually a company or a person’s ruined reputation.

  Again, I get it. But it’s shameful.

  Navigating Through It All

  Toward the end of his life, Dr. King delivered an emotional speech in Chicago. At the time, he was the recipient of despicable rumors, public attack, and constant death threats due in part to his staunch opposition to the Vietnam War. In that rare speech, Dr. King—the epitome of forgiveness—really let his feelings out and his emotions show. He talked about the pain he felt from the maltreatment of his peers. The rumors about his communist leanings and the fortune he had supposedly made off the movement had taken their toll. He said he was challenged to find ways to navigate through it all.

  Two things strike me about that particular sermon. First, even Dr. King was emotionally disturbed and distressed about the rumors that circulated about him back in the day. If he got depressed about the rumor mill then, I wonder how he would navigate commonplace demonization and distortions in the age of the Internet. As wonderful as it is, the anonymity of the Internet allows people to express darker, more sinister, and sometimes even deadly sides freely, with no consequences because there’s no real oversight attached.