{"id":4876,"date":"2011-07-27T16:48:50","date_gmt":"2011-07-27T21:48:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/?p=4876"},"modified":"2011-07-27T16:48:50","modified_gmt":"2011-07-27T21:48:50","slug":"today-in-journalism-fraud-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/?p=4876","title":{"rendered":"Today in journalism fraud."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I missed this last week: the Seattle Weekly published a story by freelance writer Rick Swart, alleging that crime writer Ann Rule misrepresented facts in her book <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0743410130\/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=stainles-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=217145&amp;creative=399369&amp;creativeASIN=0743410130\">Heart Full of Lies: A True Story of Desire and Death<\/a><\/strong><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;\" src=\"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=&amp;l=as2&amp;o=1&amp;a=0743410130&amp;camp=217145&amp;creative=399369\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" \/>. This is the kind of thing I would have paid a lot of attention to if it came across my radar; my mother is a big Ann Rule fan, and I&#8217;ve read a few of Rule&#8217;s books by way of her. I like Rule&#8217;s writing enough to be distressed at the thought.<\/p>\n<p>Yeah. Well, I&#8217;m glad that story didn&#8217;t come to my attention until today, because it turns out things are more complicated than that. To start with, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.seattleweekly.com\/content\/printVersion\/1384981\/\">Rick Swart is <strong>engaged <\/strong>to Liysa Northon<\/a>, the woman at the center of the case. (Ms. Northon was convicted of killing her husband, Chris Northon. Ms. Northon pled guilty to first-degree manslaughter, and received a 12-year sentence.)<\/p>\n<p>Not only did Mr. Swart not divulge this relationship to the editors of the Seattle Weekly, he argues that he wasn&#8217;t under any obligation to.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.seattleweekly.com\/content\/printVersion\/1384981\/\">&#8220;It&#8217;s a freelance piece first of all. I&#8217;m selling you a product. So it&#8217;s not like you&#8217;re my boss and you need to know my personal life.&#8221;<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>What makes this particularly offensive is that Mr. Swart is an experienced journalist; you would expect both that he would know better, and that he wouldn&#8217;t have this kind of arrogant attitude. Apparently not.<\/p>\n<p>(Hat tip on this to <a href=\"http:\/\/therapsheet.blogspot.com\/2011\/07\/bullet-points-debt-ceiling-debacle.html\">The Rap Sheet<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I missed this last week: the Seattle Weekly published a story by freelance writer Rick Swart, alleging that crime writer Ann Rule misrepresented facts in her book Heart Full of Lies: A True Story of Desire and Death. This is the kind of thing I would have paid a lot of attention to if it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,14,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-clippings","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4876"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4877,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4876\/revisions\/4877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}