It's always nice to visit the Shenandoah Valley. There are few parts of the world that I have visited that are so beautiful, and few that have been home to such interesting peoples.
When I was approached about speaking at Washington & Lee, I was hesitant about reopening an old wound of mine and of the journalism profession. But I was convinced that there were more lessons to be learned from my experiences.

I believe in what Robert E. Lee, a strong promoter of the journalism program at Washington & Lee, said when he came to the school to be its president after Appomattox. He said that it is "the duty of every citizen ... to do all in his power to aid in the restoration of peace and harmony." I believe it is my duty, despite my new focus on psychological coaching and mental health causes, to do what I can to aid journalism students by providing them guidance on how to avoid the rocky roads that lead to ethical transgressions.

My intention is that this will be my last public comment on journalism. I hope to reserve future conversations  about my career in journalism to private audiences of students and for individuals who might be able to benefit from my experience, learn from my mistakes and be inspired by my recovery.
I am at peace with the knowledge that there is no one or nothing to blame for my troubles but myself. I have been accused of attempting to deflect blame for fabrication and plagiarism on The New York Times, the profession of journalism, illness, substances, race and allotment of other people, places and things. Those accusations of blame are as big untruths as any of the lies I told.

I am here ... because of choices .. I made.

It is in choices that we can find lessons to be learned. It is in choices that we can find power to affect change. Understanding those choices has helped me better appreciate the human condition. Understanding those choices has helped me learn how I went from a person who nobly pledged to comfort the afflicted and to seek the truth into a man who left some deep scars on his chosen profession. Understanding those choices may never make up for what happened, but it has the potential to help strengthen the profession it so deeply wounded.
I recognize that I am but one of the voices that contribute to the lessons that can be learned from my experiences. I realize that I see my experience through a Looking Glass that provides both great insight and great distortion.  As the French author and moralist Francois de La Rochefoucauld said, "The defects and faults in the mind are like wounds in the body. After all imaginable care has been taken to heal them, still there will be a scar left behind."

One of my favorite newspaper movies is the 1994 classic The Paper, by Ron Howard. The movie is a comedy-drama about a fictitious tabloid paper called The New York Sun.  The movie stars Robert Duvall as the battle worn editor-in-chief and Michael Keaton as the eager, young, workaholic metro editor.
Toward the end of the movie, Duvall's editor-in-chief character is sitting at a bar with Keaton's metro editor character. Duvall's character asks a theoretical question of Keaton's character, whose wife is pregnant and who is asking him to spend less time at work.

 “Let me give you a hypothetical,” the Duvall character asks. “A guy breaks into the apartment. He’s got a gun, holds it to her head. He says, ‘I blow your wife’s brains out or I blow up the ‘Sun’ building. Chose. Now what do you say?”

Keatons character replies, “What do you think I say? It’s ridiculous. It’s not going to happen.”
Duvall’s character responds, “That’s exactly my point. It is never one big dramatic choice. It’s little vague situations every day … and you’re either there or you’re not. If you keep waiting for the guy with the gun to show up, it will be too late.”

Duvall knew. He was divorced. His daughter would not speak to him. All he had was the paper.
While the focus of this story is about how a noble family man slowly transforms into a workaholic who loses his family, it is an instructive lesson about choices. Rarely are our choices in life presented as major, dramatic questions. If they were, it would be easy. If had been asked one day whether I wanted to destroy my career, trash my profession and undermine belief in journalism, I would have unambiguously declined regardless of the potential benefits. But life's difficult choices rarely present themselves in one dramatic question or one big decision. Instead, our most important choices in life, including ethical ones, present themselves in small baby steps, one step at a time, and in minor choices that may not even seem to be related to the ultimate outcome. And, then, one day, like the workaholic who loses his wife or his daughter's love, you can turn around and find yourself close or across a line that you never thought you would go anywhere near.

I see this pattern every day in the lives of the people who arrive in my office at the Ashburn Psychological Services, a mental health practice in Northern Virginia. I see it in my own life, both in journalism and in other areas.
One of the first questions journalism students usually ask me is about why I got into the profession. They can at times have a hard time swallowing the notion that I got into the profession because I was curious, loved writing and wanted to help people. My reasons sound as noble as their own, and this can create some cognitive dissonance.  I think it is hard for people to process the idea, to internalize the notion, that I once was so much like them. But it is an important premise to looking at my career, because if you buy the idea that I became a journalist for such noble reasons and that I could cross the ethical lines that I did, you can buy the notion that you can. As F.B.I. profilers and forensic psychiatrists will tell you, recognizing that anyone is capable, under the right circumstances, of anything, is the first step to guarding against the evil from within.

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I had been curious and interested in writing as long as I can remember. I became interested in journalism as a high school student when I learned that newspapers could help people.  I can still remember the stories in The Washington Post and our local newspapers that propelled me into the profession. One was about the life and death of a student who had been my friend. I saw the healing power of journalism. Another was about a classmate whose insurance company had denied medical treatment for anorexia nervosa that had her hospitalized and turned into a dying skeleton. I saw the helping power of journalism when thousands of dollars were raised and the girl's insurance company reversed its decision because of the bad publicity. 

 I began writing for the high school paper and spent the summer after my senior year at a local community weekly. I followed that with enrollment at the University of Maryland, where I wrote for the daily newspaper that I would become the editor of a few years later. I was taught by greats like Hodding Carter and Reese Cleghorn. In between, I wrote and had internships at The Washington Times, The Washington Post, the Washington bureau of The Boston Globe and the Metro section of The Globe.  This experience led to my being hired in 1998 as a summer intern at The New York Times.

I was a part of a magical class of Times interns. Talented reporters like Ed Wong and Macarena Hernandez. Amazing photographers, graphic designers and editors. We were mentored by the best and expected that only one of us would be offered a position at the end of the 10-week internship. In the end, the majority of us were selected to return to the paper, although a few of those chosen pursued other options.

In the path that led me to The Times, you can begin to see the underpinnings of what contributed to my ethical failings. I entered the profession to help people, and then became convinced that to help the most people and have the greatest impact on their lives I needed to work at one of the best newspapers. Later, I became convinced, once

I accepted a position at that great paper, that I needed to have the best beat to make the most impact. Somewhere along the way, on my way climbing upwards, I lost site of the very reason that entered journalism. Once that underpinning was lost, I was anchorless. Talented and hard-working, to be sure, I was climbing aimlessly without the moral navigation system that had guided me earlier.

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No one came to my door with a gun and asked whether I wanted to shoot journalism. It was not so simple, and I must greatly emphasize that at the core, I am to blame for my choices.
There are a number of confounding factors that in some ways contributed to creating an environment ripe for my ethical transgressions. I was at the newspaper at a time when we had a new editor who had put a much greater emphasis on speed and impact. I am sure that this editor did not intentionally decide to sacrifice accuracy, and, in fact, he said that he believed that we could do things faster and more powerfully with the same amount of accuracy. However, the focus on speed and impact had an ultimate result of sacrificing some accuracy, through a "flood the zone" philosophy that re-allocated resources and left less time being devoted to reporting, writing and editing of each story.  This likely contributed to other problems the paper had during that time period.

An additional confounding factor was battle fatigue at The Times following the September 11 attacks. We were emotionally in the midst of a never-ending marathon had taken a cumulative toll on our editors and reporters.  It was in this environment that I recall first crossing the line. Once it was crossed, like so much in ethics and other areas of life, it was so much easier to cross again.

An additional factor to involves my own personal struggles, which are not very relevant to the journalistic lessons that can be learned. I have discussed my struggles with mental illness and substance abuse elsewhere, and will not dwell on them here, but, suffice to say, that my recovery from alcohol and drug abuse, while life changing in a positive way, was the harbinger leading the way to the intensified presentation of mental health symptoms that aided fuel to a fire initially ignited by character flaws, allowing it to burn brighter and longer.  

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One of the major problems with the instruction of ethics is that the focus is often more greatly on best practices when we can learn the most from worst practices, which set firm boundaries and teach us how good people end up doing bad things. If we merely believe that only bad people do bad things, then you good people have no reason to learn ethics at all, for you are destined to do good no matter what happens. This seems contrary to everything we know about the human condition.

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I would like to address, before beginning our discussion, my feelings about The Times. It's a wonderful newspaper, whose editors came to my rescue on the day of my resignation,  They responded with human kindness by emptying the newsroom to find me, to make sure that I was safe and to get me the medical attention that they assumed I needed.  I continue to be grateful to them.  Thank you all very much for listening.