The big lie: Janet Cooke's story was powerful, but her central character didn't exist. Others also tampered with the truth. ('81).

U.S. News & World Report found the front-page story from the September 28, 1980, Washington Post so remarkable it reran it in its entirety. "Jimmy is 8 years old," it began, "and a third-generation heroin addict, a precocious little boy with sandy hair, velvety brown eyes and needle marks

No one was surprised the following spring when "Jimmy's Story" won its author, the Post staff writer Janet Cooke, a Pulitzer Prize, though Cooke herself had been fervently praying that she wouldn't win at all. For "Jimmy" didn't exist. (The best Cooke could say in her defense was that he was a composite based on real child addicts she had observed in reportlng an assignment on new developments in the D.C. drug scene). Also nonexistent was the Vassar degree she claimed on her resume. She hadn't attended the Sorbonne, as she claimed, and she didn't know four languages, as the Post's editor, Benjamin C. Bradlee, learned when he grilled her in rapid-fire French. The Post returned the Pulitzer; Cooke resigned. Bradlee devoted a chapter to the incident in his 1995 autobiography A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures, calling it "a cross that journalism, especially The Washington Post, and especially Benjamin C. Bradlee, will bear forever."

The story became the gold standard by which all other acts of journalistic mendacity were measured, even when a veritable wave of journalistic fabulism began in the late 1990s. Just to name a few: A hotshot young New Republic associate editor, Stephen Glass, invented characters, details, and entire premises for twenty-seven of the forty-one articles he published in the magazine between 1995 and 1998. Columnists Mike Barnicle and Patricia Smith left The Boston Globe in 1998 over charges of plagiarism and fabrication. This year, the online magazine Slate produced a fraudulent story on the invented subject of "monkey fishing" -- angling for simians in trees. And hardly a story appeared on these transgressions that did not reference l'affaire Cooke.

Janet Cooke herself has apparently found a measure of redemption. In 1996 she cooperated with an old boyfriend and Post colleague, who published a long, forgiving piece about her life in GQ magazine. And there may be a movie; TriStar Pictures has the film rights to the story, and Cooke is guaranteed a cut if it ever gets made.

Cooke herself had a ready explanation for her stunning windfall: "The worse it is, the better it is, that's what we always said in daily journalism." --R.P.