By I was reading the book Korea Witness which is a compilation of various stories from journalists that have covered Korea over the years. One of the chapters is written by long time Korean journalist Donald Kirk who provides some insight into an anti-US military article from Rolling Stone reporter Kevin Heldman that if you do a Google search for it you will see just about every left wing, communist rag has the article featured on their website.
This hit piece article was written back in 1996 and is full of so many holes that it is not worth even getting into because it would take me all day to type up the rebuttal, but it is interesting to find out the background details about how the article came about:
Billy’s successor, Jim Coles, liked so much to please he had a habit of opening his mouth far too much for his own good. When a reporter for Rolling Stone came around in 1996 looking for a sure-fire negative article, Coles showed how much he was into it by taking the guy around to GI bars, then hustling a couple of girls into a hotel room. True, the reporter “protected” his source to the extent of identifying him as “Public Affairs”, but the story, when it appeared on the web, fleshed out by graphic descriptions and anti-army quotes in just about every sentence, was enough to end Coles’ dream of another tour showing eager correspondents around his favorite haunts. [Korea Witness - Pg 269]
Jim Coles was a civilian working for USFK that took Heldman around Itaewon and gave the grain of truth to the distortions in Heldman’s article. There are many more interesting anecdotes like this about events in Korean history, the journalists that served there, and articles written about the place that makes this book so interesting to read.
9:32 am on October 26th, 2007 1
I’ll have to read that book.
I remember coming across that article a year or so into Korea back in the late 1990s and thinking it sounded like dramatic fiction.
Later on, when I went back looking for it again a couple of years ago to put on the anti-USFK/US Newsletter site, I had seen the Stephan Glass-New Republic movie (Broken Glass) that reminded me of this USFK hit-piece. It was just too over the top to believe. A reporter would have had to cream his pants to run into something that perfect to report — just rolling waves – wave after wave – of perfect stereotypical bad GI Joe stuff coming to him…
http://usinkorea.org/issues/kmag/index.html
That is the review I did of the article.
I think you got one part wrong. At least it is different from what I found…
Rolling Stone is where the “reporter” was working at the time, but they turned it down and the reporter wasn’t there much longer after that —- I think he spun it as he left RS rather than the other way around…..but he wasn’t around after that piece was turned down – from what I remember…
The “reporter” then found a home for it at Noam Chompsky’s place ZMag.
I think if you read some of the guy’s earlier work, it also reads EXACTLY like the kind of stuff Stephan Glass and now this new guy (Scott Thompson Beauchamps) were writing — stuff that sounds like some high school later-teen with some (immature) writing talent sat down and imagined what would make a great fictional “news” essay for some English class assignment.
Sometimes when something seems to good to be true —- it probably isn’t……
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9:33 am on October 26th, 2007 2
I think that movie might have been entitled Shattered Glass…pretty good if not thrilling movie. Can’t wait to see the Beauchamps sequel…
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12:44 pm on October 26th, 2007 3
Get the book is quite good for anyone who really follows Korean affairs. When I first read the guys article as well I was sure is was greatly exagerrated as well. It was the same thing I thought when I first read Beauchamp’s articles.
It is simply a writer writing something to meet what the publisher wants and expects. Publishing the truth would mean it does not get published. Writers earn paychecks and get recognized for what gets published thus they write what fits the publishers agenda.
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5:43 pm on July 16th, 2009 4
This is from Kevin Heldman — I wrote an article on the US military in Korea originally for Rolling Stone (On the Town With the US Military) a while back.
You are entitled to your opinion, call me left wing, not like my style, my taste, all that — but I’ve been a journalist since 1987 and I’ve never written an untrue word in my life in an article.
Every single word in that article is true, every incident happened, absolutely nothing was exaggerated — I was shocked myself how crazy some of it was (Public Affairs spokesman was that out of control and hostile and didn’t give a damn; troops’ morale was extremely low).
USINKOREA, I read your review of my article — I don’t know your name — you say over and over again I’m a liar. Track it down, back it up. How can you so casually accuse someone like that — just because you don’t like the article you condemn me, slam me as a liar. I dug, I researched, I dragged around all over, went through a hell of a lot of work — there’s a lot of behind the scenes work and sourcing that goes into getting information.
Not a word is false, absolutely nothing is made up. The article was killed by Rolling Stone after a number of standard rewrites because it “was too dark” – - I got contracts for stories from them after that — there was never any hint or idea that my reporting was false and there has never been in my life.
USINKOREA, this was my career; what do you do for a living? Can I just come in and say you’re a fraud because I have an opinion; you’re okay with that? I don’t really have the stomach or relish the harsh fighting, attacking, left vs. right part of journalism, but what I wrote was honest.
Argue that the article could have been more balanced, less bleak (I think US military morale is higher today; certainly higher than when I was in overseas in the late 80s), criticize something substantive, but don’t convict me of something I didn’t do, call me a liar because the story “sounds too good,” go on and on just throwing out innuendos — you don’t provide one hard concrete fact.
It was reported — it’s what actually, really, in real life happened, all of it.
Kevin Heldman
http://journalismworksproject.org/
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6:01 pm on July 16th, 2009 5
Uhmm, Mr. Heldman did you notice the date on USINKOREA’s post? A little late don’t you think.
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7:24 pm on July 16th, 2009 6
If this is truly Mr. Heldman, I’m glad you state your opinion, but I’ll remain convinced you are a boldfaced liar based on what I read in the piece and know about the world.
If I am wrong, I’m wrong. I’m sure it will not impact on your life beyond a minuscule amount.
The people at the New Republic should have realized Stephen Glass was a phony because – like your piece – some of his stuff was just too much wall-to-wall perfection for the story he wanted to write.
You point out “too good to be true” is a weak argument. Yes it is.
But how many people going back over Stephen Glass’s lie after lie after lie after lie — published article after published article – in a magazine with a hell of lot more credibility than zmag – are saying to themselves, “How could I NOT notice this was too good to be true!!”
http://www.slate.com/id/2074/
Here is the secondary headline for that slate piece:
You demand proof of an accusation about a decade-old story…sure…
I stated and state plainly again — your story doesn’t pass the stink test. If it is my ideology that allows me to smell the bullshit more accutely and Jack Shafer’s liberalism that let Glass’s get by him, fine…
…but I am not objecting to your article as unfair or too partisan or not balanced. I don’t believe it enough warrant passing it through an ideological check.
I’m fine with the quotes I used to explain why I ended up believing you made the bulk of the story up — or perhaps better phrased – made up key elements in most of the scenes you describe to lead the reader in the direction you wanted the story to go.
If you went to a whorehouse with the USFK guy and the poor little hooker who you were man enough not to sleep with came over to you and gave you a language dictionary and pointed to the word “abuser” (I think it was), I’ll beat Michael Jordan in a game of 21 and Stephan Glass really did walk in on two coke-snorting young republicans screwing in the toilet of that swank hotel hosting the CPAC conference.
But you still want proof. Do you remember the name of the hooker? Where she worked? Got any finger prints I can match? I’m going back to Korea this Fall, maybe I’ll go dig her up a decade later and grill her to get to the bottom of the truth with proof…(her words as reported by me…that’ll help…)
The bottom line is simple and I believe fair: In the end, readers will decide who they believe and how much.
Maybe they will believe you because I don’t do a good enough job picking apart the quotes I offer or they don’t think not having “hard evidence” is good enough to pass their smell test.
Maybe they’ll believe me more because they might decide on reading your piece alone that it is way too good to be true and sounds phony or maybe I’ll help them come to that conclusion with what I wrote.
Maybe most readers will chalk it all up to “Who knows?”
I’m sure most will chalk it up to “Who cares?”
You demand “proof” on stuff that could have been created out of thin air, over a decade ago, just like Stephen Glass could.
He made up stories whole cloth that went through an elaborate fact-checking system — and did it time and time and time again for a serious political news magazine.
But you want me to prove you’re lying or withdraw the claim? Prove it on a story published a decade ago? sure…
It’s fine to come here and stick up for yourself. Honestly. I know I would if it had told the truth in the story. (I probably would too if I were I liar and lied my ass off in it too…)
But I believe my opinion isn’t going to adversely harm you at all.
Again, readers can read both pieces and make up their own minds on how they feel about it.
And I certainly don’t have the readership your article does…
As to one of your questions, I’m a teacher. If you want to write a long article talking about what a horrible teacher I am and say I abuse kids and put a bunch of quotes from them about the horrors I’ve done to them — go ahead. Let me know where you post it, and I’ll respond. I’ll survive either way.
I’m sure my opinion about your article has done zero to hurt your career. I am sure I have cost you zero jobs. I’m sure I will cost you zero jobs in the future.
Again — readers of the two pieces will weigh everything themselves…
…I’m fine with that…
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7:40 pm on July 16th, 2009 7
I haven’t read that page on my site in a very long time, so I went back to it.
And I’m even much less concerned about being unfair to Mr. Heldman than I was in my last comment – and I wasn’t much concerned then…
Especially when I re-read “page” 4 of my review:
I think that’s fair enough in the Internet age.
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10:58 pm on July 16th, 2009 8
I read that piece after DEROSing to my next assignment in the states and I passed it around to several of my Korea vet friends… One of them knew the guy who was subject of the piece, and didn’t care much for him. That said, if all you did was go out to shitty places, don’t expect to meet the Royal Family out there.
As for the poor abused wench- These women- and these people in general lie like rugs and will manipulate men who they see as suckers to believe them for their mercenary reasons- especially the little spunk eaters hanging out trolling for big nose foreigners in Itaewon. I hope he back doored her and wiped it off in her hair. She knew where she was, and what kinds of people she’d be dealing with and likely had done the same thing with countless others. Go to any Kimchi bar around any US base in the USA and meet some of the women there with their sad stories- all horse crap, and all lies.
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11:34 pm on July 16th, 2009 9
Is this the same report which had the quotes from the “1% biker gang member” or some such? Either:
1. The conversation never happened.
-or-
2. The naivety of the reporter is a serious issue.
I suspect #2 actually. I won’t go into detail on this aspect but suffice to say I believe the reporter in question was fed a buffet of bullshit with cheesecake for dessert. Perhaps his assumed political leanings made him WANT to believe? I guess it’s hard to say. Regardless, this report and others like it caused a knee jerk reaction from the leadership which has resulted in a great deal of pain for all involved ever since.
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July 17th, 2009 at 3:28 am
I remember him talking to the “NFL” crowd, but I don’t recall the bikers…
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July 17th, 2009 at 4:11 am
It might have been a different hit piece.
Check that, from the article – after the NFL crowd:
With An Army CID Man
In one camp-town I run into a soldier who’s wearing a leather jacket covered with biker patches and an FTW patch. I make small talk with him, tell him who I am, what I’m doing, and he tells me he’s a 29 year old sergeant in the military police, stationed at the nearby base (this was confirmed when he ran into several of his M.P. colleagues who were on duty and addressed him as such). We spend some time talking, going to different bars. After a while he tells me he rides with a 1% (outlaw) motorcycle cl ub back home, which he refers to generically as the Brotherhood. He says he pledged before he joined the military and always lets the club know where he’s stationed.
After some more time together he tells me he was CID (the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division) and spent 4 years undercover in the States and Europe, with long hair, civilian clothes, and a fake ID card, working drug interdiction. He says he took down about 19 M.P.s who were dirty, and arrested officers and First Sergeants for dealing and trafficking drugs. He quit when they wanted him to inform on the Brotherhood.
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July 17th, 2009 at 5:37 am
Sad fact is that he might have been right on with that- we have those guys in the Army (and other services) along with the various ethnically categorized gangs- and it seems the people in charge just look the other way. I see gang signs and colors, and when I was on a US FOB in CENTCOM, there was gang graffiti all over the concrete barriers.
The 1%ers have infiltrated plenty of places, and the military is just one of the institutions they have people in.
I’m also not going to deny that he saw and reported what he saw in Itaewon- but anything an Itaewon wench says is usually twisted to her benefit. These people are not “honest whores” we met 3 decades ago- they are professional grifters, some not very smart, but they still are able to use truth as a commodity.
And the losers he met- well, if you go out to loser places, again, you aren’t going to meet America’s best and brightest.
That said, he should have seen the place about 20 years BEFORE he got there! It was…it was…well, a HELL of a lot of fun for a 19 year old kid from the country coming down from Up North in Seriousland.
7:46 am on July 17th, 2009 10
I’m still going to ball bullshit based on nothing more than critical reading skills.
Go back to the article and read it.
Then read some of the articles about Stephen Glass here: http://www.rickmcginnis.com/articles/Glassindex.htm
You can’t access the actual Glass articles unless you have Lexus Nexus access because the New Republic scrubbed them from the Internet.
But, the worst of Glass’s many fictions read exactly like this Heldman piece – and like the Beauchamps pieces and like that female reporter in the 1980s who made up the stories about the drug addicted little kid.
They use “firsthand” “person to person” encounters to paint a powerful narrative — and one that is hard to pin down or track down.
And the real tell-tale sign is how they can’t seem to stop themselves once the tall-tale narrative gets their juices flowing: their “news” stories become narratives with wall-to-wall stereotypical encounters with stereotypical people…
…that is why some of the liberal journalists writing after the Glass story broke said they couldn’t believe, in hindsight, how they fell for all those outrageous articles.
Heldman’s reads exactly the same. Exactly.
I have zero doubt USFK has a problem with alcoholism. I have no doubt it has problems with racism and gangs. I have no doubt it has people in it who loath the military. Pick pretty much any single factual category Heldman explorers in the piece, and I’d say I agree pretty much completely that it is a legitimate category and area for discussion about USFK in Korean society.
But, throw them all together in one short trip to Korea in such a nice, neat little package that fits an absolutely perfect narrative for this reporter?
No way. Not a chance.
I don’t see how any other reasonable person reading the entire piece could do anything but come away thinking it must be largely made up.
….and he can say Rolling Stone (and others) turned it down because it was too dark or to anti-military or whatever….
….but my instinct tells me a lot of editors probably had the very same misgivings about it I had reading it…
……of which of course Noam Chompsky wouldn’t…..
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8:06 am on July 17th, 2009 11
I have a big headache right now and don’t feel like checking this out — but if you go to my page on this article that I linked in comment #1 –
if I remember correctly — in the parts that talk about Helman’s career that I took from one or two websites I link there —
— I seem to remember that two of the stories that didn’t get published by orgs that led to him breaking with them (and/or them him) had something in common: Both were articles about his own personal experience — personal experience carried out in an “investigative journalism” effort — which happened to take place overseas — far from the prying eyes of editors…
I’ll have to check that later…
It isn’t much evidence — I admit that fully and restate it — it isn’t much evidence —- but it is curious if my memory is serving correct:
What a better way to write a really graphic, powerful piece — where you make up and/or grossly exaggerate what you actually do experience –
than by going over the seas and in at least in the Korea case halfway around the world — to do it?
How many editors are going to bust a gut trying to track down the people you interviewed?
When you’re writing about street people or gang members in the US military, how easy is it going to be to track them down and get them to speak frankly to an editor or fact checker in the first place?
I would think an editor would force the reporter to give him the real names of the soldiers and would expect the reporter to have written down the real names and maybe contact information in his notes…but who knows….
And that is why these famous liars in the media chose to go for the big headlines by writing such powerful pieces by using firsthand accounts of people that would be hard to track down.
If Glass or that woman for the Boston Globe, I believe it was, had not been too good at what they were doing, if they had not become so popular with their stories, nobody would have gone to the considerable trouble of trying to track down so many fictional people to do follow up stories.
We can add the Nogunri AP piece to this list as well: There the journalists didn’t come out and tell bold faced lies, but they were all too happy to quote extensively with powerful quotes from a couple of people who should have been easily verifiable as liars based on their military records…
People naturally believe firsthand accounts add credibility in a news article. I think we’ve seen that proven abused enough to doubt it somewhat.
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8:49 am on July 17th, 2009 12
I was right in that Spin magazine is an American outfit which balked at publishing his exposee of homeless culture in London.
I was wrong about the Boston Globe — the female reporter who wrote the powerful firsthand experience lies about the young drug addict worked for the Washington Post…
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8:54 am on July 17th, 2009 13
I was also wrong in that the Boston Globe reporter got caught because other news reporters tried to pile on the story. It got caught because the DC mayor had the police scour the city trying to find the 8 year old heroin addict to save him and couldn’t locate him and began to smell a rat.
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1:37 pm on July 17th, 2009 14
Hmmm…
On one hand, I believe he is absolutely correct in everything he wrote…
…because I saw almost all of that first-hand.
On the other, it took me about 6 years of living in the middle of it to get the same picture.
Did it all happen? I’m sure.
Did it all happen to him all around the same time? Proably not.
This is the essence of “truthiness” in reporting.
That’s all.
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1:04 am on July 18th, 2009 15
I agree with 14’s first part but disagree with the rest:
It is a lie. Both technically and journalistic.
Like in the Stephen Glass piece, you can also say that there are surely young Republicans on college campus who are just as big asses as Glass reports meeting in one day at that conference.
Without a doubt, it is true some of the young republicans do drugs, have casual sex in the restrooms of a hotel or public place and abuse women.
You can say the same about any sizable organization of people.
But, to jam pack all that “truth” into a fictitious narrative supposedly covering one day of experience — what do you get?
What the author desired, a false picture damning the group targeted. A demonization. Not just a stretching of the truth.
The Heldman article is wall-to-wall gore for USFK. 14 pages of absolutely nothing but a bunch of assholes and criminals.
Does that match your conclusion after 6+ years experience?
That is why this article is a big fat lie and fraud.
It it were the truth, everyday in the service in USFK and every night on the town would be a huge cesspool surrounding a broken organization in desperate need of fundamental reform.
And that is how the kind of people who read Zmag think of the US military and the military in general.
And whatever grains of truth they might point to to justify their grossly exaggerated opinion, they are still wrong. Not “mostly right but just a little off.”
Heldman’s article does not pass the smell test.
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4:39 am on July 18th, 2009 16
USinKorea…
I did not communicate well.
I do not condone “truthiness” because it, as you well stated, shades the issue.
I saw a lot of crappy stuff in 6+ years… but the number of great men and women doing good things far surpassed it… to the point that much of the crappiness was diluted away… although the actions of “leadership” is a slightly different story.
“Truthiness” is a journalistic lie to give credibility to a viewpoint which is trying to be sold.
Strangely, it the opposite, yet has the same purpose as Stars & Stripes reporting which manages to sell a viewpoint by exactly reporting the facts… but in such a way that they never report the story.
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9:25 am on July 18th, 2009 17
It was the “That’s all” that clouded it…I get your point now…
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