Busted

There was a very funny story this week about a prep school principal in New York who was caught inflating his background accomplishments just a bit. It seems that this fellow was bragging to his father-in-law (who unfortunately happens to be his boss) about having been on the Canadian bicycling team that competed in the Barcelona Olympic Games. While the man in question was a competitive rider at that time, there is no indication he was ever on (or even tried out for) the Canadian Olympic Team. I suppose he figured that no one would check – Americans are notorious for paying zero attention to anyone else’s Olympic athletes, and this was years ago, anyway – but the father-in-law was so impressed he put the whole thing on the school’s biography web page…

Sure enough, someone decided to check, discovered the lie, and exposed it. Then the media got hold of it, it started spreading around the local papers and newscasts, it appeared on the Internet, and pretty soon everybody in the world knew (or could easily find out) that Mr. Durnford was unwise enough to forget that the membership of Olympic teams is a matter of public record and can easily be checked by anyone who wants to. In anyone else it might have been a minor embarrassment – the sort of thing that your in-laws keep bringing up to put you down, and your buddies rag on your for until the next embarrassing thing that one of you does distracts their attention. Unfortunately, as the Principal of a prestigious private academy, Mr. Durnford is a public figure, and is now going down in flames…

I’m sure he’ll be all right in the end; impersonating an Olympian is not a crime, and it’s not like he was under oath when he said it. A much more serious case came up when a student turned in a paper to a professor of my acquaintance in which the (20-year-old) pupil claimed to have known the (then) President of South Korea for over 35 years. The whole thing was obviously plagiarized, and the student had failed to edit out this personal comment from the veteran reporter who wrote the original essay. The fact that the professor was able to find the original essay on Google in less than three seconds (it was one of the first hits to come up) just made things worse – and prevented the Dean of the college in question from offering much mercy.

Then we have the curious case of the Food Network’s Robert Irvine, the celebrity chef who claimed to have worked on the cake for the Royal Wedding in 1981 (when he was 15) and cooked for kings and presidents (while never having done either). You could see this as the counterpoint, if you really wanted to, in that these deceptions held together long enough for Irvine to get his own series, but I must point out that they were exposed in the end, and any competent researcher could have debunked them right from the beginning using the same sort of Internet search..

My point here is that while not all puffery is going to result in public humiliation, destroy your career, get you thrown out of college (and probably disowned; the student’s parents did not get a refund on the tuition for the year that was voided off the student’s records) or have people all over the Internet (and therefore all over the world) calling you a careless dumbass, the days in which you can expect to make absurd statements of fact and have them go unchallenged is long gone. For all that the deception and fraud on the Internet has changed our world, the truth is out there, too – and it definitely cuts both ways…