On July 30, 1996, Kathy Scruggs, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, broke a story of seismic importance. A security guard named Richard Jewell was the focus of the federal investigation into a bomb attack that killed one person and injured 100 others at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta. A couple of days after the story ran, Scruggs told a colleague, “Yeah, we think he’s the guy.”

He wasn’t. Jewell was innocent. Yet CNN ran with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s article, and for the next 88 days Jewell was hunted down by reporters. He was one of the first victims of what would become known as “trial by media.” When his name was finally cleared, Jewell, who died in 2007, sued the paper. He also sued the New York Post, NBC News, and CNN, and settled with all three. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution fought the suit and, in 1999, Scruggs was ordered to jail if she didn’t reveal her source for the story. She refused but avoided jail on appeal.

What happened in the years following the story was more interesting than the story itself. Scruggs went into a spiral of guilt and depression, finally dying of a drug overdose in 2001. “I think the Jewell case killed Kathy Scruggs,” her fellow journalist and friend Doug Monroe wrote in 2003. “Certainly, the stress that plagued her in the aftermath of the story contributed to the health problems that led to her unspeakably sad death.”

Monroe added this:

Critics later said the AJC failed to exercise healthy skepticism about information from law enforcement sources. And some cops and friends feel Scruggs became the scapegoat for errors of fact and judgement made by her editors.

As a journalist, I’ve always felt badly for Kathy Scruggs, and even felt that in the end, she had integrity. While she always claimed that her story was accurate—in fact authorities were looking at Jewell, which is all she reported—her conscience bothered her because of what happened to him. She wound up taking up the cross that should have been borne by the FBI and other journalists who hyped her story beyond her initial reporting. In fact, one of them came right out and apologized. In what today would be considered an astonishing move, CNN producer Henry Schuster actually wrote an apology to Jewell: “I made Richard Jewell famous—and ruined his life.”

More recently, in 2024 a New York Times reporter named David Enrich apologized—sort of—to me. When I confronted Enrich about his abysmal coverage of me during the 2018 Brett Kavanaugh circus, Enrich texted me the following: “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my role in the Kavanaugh coverage, and I would be happy to talk to you about it at some point. For now, I will just say that I have learned some lessons and would probably do certain things differently next time.” Then he added this: “I can’t imagine what it was like for you to go thru that.”

This week Erik Wemple, a media columnist for the Washington Post, announced he was leaving the Post—a paper with serious problems—to go to the New York Times. This is an interesting move, as Wemple has indicated that he’s willing to call out bad actors in the media. “After 14 very, very happy years writing opinions on media at the Washington Post, I am taking the newspaper’s buyout offer. In September, I will begin work at the New York Times covering media from Washington for the paper’s Business section,” Wemple wrote on social media.

Wemple joined the Post in 2011. He exposed numerous falsehoods in an Atlantic feature written by Ruth Shalit Barrett.

Last year, Georgetown University held a symposium about the state of journalism. When asked what the main issue facing the press is, Wemple, a panel member, offered an honest answer: Journalists need to learn how to apologize when they make mistakes. Wemple further commented:

News organizations, when they put out these big stories, they pour their souls into these pieces, and when they turn out to be [expletive] up, they can never, ever—it takes them forever to come to grips with it. So people on the outside say, “Well, why can’t you just admit this is wrong?” No, no! We sweated over this, we edited this five times, it went through fifteen layers, we lawyered it. And it’s just like there is this emotional attachment to the work, and when news organizations drag their heels— take the [fake] gang rape story with Rolling Stone at UVA, it took them months or years [to admit it was false]. They finally had to commission an investigation, I think that is what is common to most media crises. It’s not just the first mistake. It’s the refusal and the stubborn resistance to change or to correct. … Editors [will say] ‘Well, you know, if we make a mistake we correct it.’ And that’s just not often the case.

Wemple is one of the few mainstream media reporters who has admitted that Russiagate is and always was a scam. It will be fascinating to see if he challenges his new colleagues at the Times about their appalling lies about Russiagate. He might even think about asking David Enrich when I can expect that follow-up conversation about the Times and their ridiculous Kavanaugh coverage.

Russiagate, the Covington Catholic kids, Brett Kavanaugh, Kyle Rittenhouse, and the conservatives who sounded the alarm about Joe Biden’s health years ago and were mocked. The kid who dressed up in face paint for the Kanas City Chiefs and was accused of using blackface is yet another example of the long dishonorable list of journalistic abuse at the Times. Kathy Scruggs had enough of a conscience that the Richard Jewell story haunted her for the rest of her life. “She was never at peace or at rest with this story,” Tony Kiss, one of her coworkers, once wrote. “It haunted her until her last breath. It crushed her like a junebug on the sidewalk.” 

Scruggs is a symbol of the transition from one form of journalism to another—from the kind of responsible reporting that allowed her to slow down long enough in 1996 to realize Jewell could not have been the bomber and that her reporting encouraged the journalistic equivalent or a mob, to the modern age where we have people dying by a thousand social media cuts, facing accusations from posters who are little more than sociopaths.

Even though there were plenty of unscrupulous journalists who were willing to pile on, at least Scruggs and the contrite CNN producer who publicly apologized to Jewell were willing to step up and admit they were wrong. Today they have been replaced by the likes of Taylor Lorenz and Rachel Maddow.

Today’s journalists are like active alcoholics who simply will not admit to any wrongdoing or even that they have a problem. The first drink was Watergate. The 1970s scandal that drove Richard Nixon from office was a great party for the press. The atmosphere in the media and on the left was glamorous, filling writers with a sense of intoxicated invincibility. Everyone wanted to be Robert Redford in All the President’s Men.

For the past 50 years, the press has been chasing and trying to replicate that buzz. Journalism is no longer a way to convey news from your community to the masses. It’s a means to destroy someone powerful (or even just a regular Joe, if he’s attached somehow to a powerful person or idea) and become a celebrity.

Just as an alcoholic will start to cut ethical corners and consume more and more booze to less and less effect, reporters post-Watergate became sloppy and even uninterested in facts. Mistakes and lies became more and more common. 

Apologize? Forget it. They can’t even admit they have a problem. Here’s to Wemple and to hoping he might show some guts when he walks into the Times.