Times Writer Caught Making Up Survey Results To Add Sizzle to Story
Paul Burnham Finney, an occasional writer for the Times, wrote up what appeared to be a quite a timely study for the October 14 "Itineraries" section of the Times. In "Upgrading the Stress Levels," Finneyrevealed that a survey from the American Psychological Association had determined that "the crisis on Wall Street was the No. 1 cause of anxiety" among business travelers.
As if the shoes-off routine, charges for checked bags and missed flight connections were not enough, business travelers now have to cope with a global financial crisis that is diverting their attention as well as rattling their contacts here and abroad.
It all adds up to a spike in the unusual stresses that plague business travel, from unfamiliar hotels to sudden switches in travel plans. Experts at the Mayo Clinic and Harvard Medical School along with independent psychologists agree that road life now is more stressful than in the past.
"Back in the 1980s, you could drive to the airport and walk to the gate without thinking of terrorist threats or banks collapsing," said Rex P. Gatto, a business psychologist based in Pittsburgh. "Now there's only anxiety."
In its latest annual "Stress in America" survey, based on 2,507 online interviews in September, the American Psychological Association found that the crisis on Wall Street was the No. 1 cause of anxiety. And participants in the survey said the places where they felt most vulnerable to stress were in the office and on a business trip.
But it turned out the study was a little too timely, at least as portrayed by Finney; none of the information in bold above actually came from the study. In an apparent attempt to add some sizzle to fit the current headlines on the financial crisis, Finney simply made up some survey results, the Times revealed in a stern Editors' Note on Tuesday, admitting that Finney "distorted the survey's findings to fit his theme, contrary to The Times's standards of integrity." (Of course, distorting facts in the cause of a liberal story is not a foreign concept at the Times.)
Here's an excerpt from Tuesday's Editors' Note:
An article in the Itineraries pages last Tuesday reported about the increasing stress on business travelers, and cited the findings of "Stress in America," an annual survey of the American Psychological Association. That survey found that economic factors were the leading causes of stress levels in 2008, but it did not say, as the article did, that "the crisis on Wall Street was the No. 1 cause of anxiety," nor did participants in the survey say they felt most vulnerable to stress "in the office and on a business trip."
The survey included data from Sept. 19 to Sept. 23, 2008, a period of volatility on Wall Street, but none of the questions in the association's survey referred to Wall Street or any economic crises. Participants were not asked how business travel affected their stress levels or where they felt most vulnerable to stress.
