Alexis Debat may have pretended to interview Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Michael Bloomberg, but he never screwed ABC on a story.
Last week, ABC cleared their French consultant from any wrongdoing on his reporting for the network. But there are still some questions about when exactly ABC discovered this.
According to an ABC memo, when concerns about Debat came up in May, the network had Chris Isham, then head of their investigative unit, look into Debat’s work.
ABC News has completed its investigation of Alexis Debat (a.k.a. the French Jayson Blair) the "journo" was recently fired by the work for "falsifying his resumé" and "generally making shit up."
Ultimately, ABC has concluded that "the reporting he had contributed to the network was sound." Somewhat less sound, however, are ABC's lax non-discriminatory hiring guidelines and noticeable absence of background checks.
Fortunately, reports the Times, "ABC says it will make changes to its hiring practices." To that end, the proposed change already being taken under advisement: Stop hiring any/all known plagiarists.
At 35, Alexis Debat was pretty successful. He had a respectable position in a well-regarded think tank, he was a regular face on television, he was quoted in newspapers… why did he need to keep fabricating interviews in a French journal with a limited circulation?
Interesting query, Rue89! But we think we've got it all figured out.
Presumably, Debat did it for the same reason that always drives people to routinely make up semi-believable interviews for modestly read French publications, namely they're insecure, overcompensating for a lifetime of inadequacy and slightly fucked in the head.
You're welcome.
Faux journalist Alexis Debat just resigned from the Nixon Center, the Washington think tank where he worked. [AP]
ABC will launch a second investigation on Alexis Debat, the French “journalist” who concocted interviews with Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates and Nancy Pelosi, to name a few. Debat reported and provided information to ABC as a consultant for five years. Brian Ross, who worked with Debat, told the New York Times, “We [sic] going at this again with a vengeance.”
If ABC can learn anything from the Times, it's to go hard after lying journalists and to include verbs when quoting people.
French writer Alexis Debat is coming under fire for embellishing an interview with Barack Obama. And by embellish, he made up the whole thing.
In the French magazine Politique Internationale, Debat quoted Obama as saying Iraq was “a defeat for America.” Debat never interviewed Obama, and of course, Obama would never say that in so many words.
The "journalist" also fabricated interviews for Politique Internationale with Nancy Pelosi, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates and Kofi Annan and was fired from ABC News this past June when they discovered he had lied about having received a PhD from the Sorbonne.
Alexis Debat: Just one more reason to hate the French.
