Great Story—But Is It True?

On May 3, 1964, the New York Times published a chilling story about a secret Harlem gang called the Blood Brothers.

Supposedly numbering about 60 young black men, they were “roaming the streets of Harlem with the avowed intention of attacking white people.” In follow-up stories, revelations mounted: soon the Blood Brothers were said to have upward of 400 members, not 60. They carried makeshift weapons, trained in karate and judo, and found even Malcolm X “too mild.” They had no turf to defend and no neighborhood to protect. Their target, the Times curtly reported, was “the white man.”

But nobody could find them.

The story’s author was Junius Griffin, only the third or fourth black reporter the Times had ever hired. City editor A. M. Rosenthal was so pleased with that he gave Griffin a $100 bonus and circulated a congratulatory memo to the newsroom.

When reporters from the New York Herald Tribune and the World-Telegram and Sun tried following up on the story, they failed. A researcher whom Griffin had cited as a source later clarified that he’d only heard rumors about the Blood Brothers. Griffin insisted that he had personally met members of the gang in “a dark hallway of a tenement building.” But when editors pressed him to follow up, he said that he could no longer locate them.

Griffin claimed that he’d acted on a tip from the NYPD, which was investigating a series of murders of whites in Harlem. Perhaps he got snookered by some tough-talking teenagers. Or he made it all up. Either way, Griffin must have sensed that his lurid portrait of ghetto life would be titillating to his white editors.

Nat Hentoff, writing in the Village Voice, predicted that the Blood Brothers reporting would go down “as the most irresponsible local news story of the year.” The NAACP demanded that the state attorney general investigate what it called the Times’s “slanderous lies.” Gallows humor arose in the Times newsroom; reporters quipped that the Blood Brothers story was Rosenthal’s Bay of Pigs. Gay Talese, who was working for the Times back then and later wrote a magisterial history of the newspaper, stated flatly in 2004, “That story was fake.”

The Times never formally admitted any errors, but Griffin’s career did not recover. He resigned from journalism to become a speechwriter for Martin Luther King, Jr., and later worked in public relations for Motown Records.

The internet reminds us daily that people can be fooled by a good story. So, too, can elite institutions—especially when it confirms what they want to believe. The Jason Arday fiasco, at the University of Cambridge, shows this plainly.

Given the heavy coverage and commentary it has garnered over the past two weeks, the saga of Arday’s fraudulent scholarship and extensively fictional personal narrative is now well known. Among many other claims, he said that he could not speak until he was 11 and could not read or write until 18; that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days; and that he raised £5 million for charity. These and many other assertions fell apart upon examination, as did Arday’s posture of scholarship: his C.V. claims authorship of a book that does not exist, and his Ph.D. dissertation was heavily plagiarized. In naming him, to great fanfare, as the youngest black professor in the university’s history, Cambridge’s nine-professor appointing panel failed the most basic part of its job.

In 1964, when Griffin wrote about a mysterious black gang bent on attacking whites, New York City was already on edge over rising crime and racial tensions. (The Harlem riots would erupt only weeks later.) The Times hired Griffin specifically to cover news from the black community, and he gave his bosses what he must have thought they wanted. At Cambridge, a similar instinct prevailed. Arday’s biography seemed to exemplify values prized in higher education for years: diversity, inclusion, triumph over adversity, and the elevation of historically underrepresented scholars.

Both embarrassing episodes offer the same lesson: when narratives about race confirm what credentialed elites already believe, their skepticism is likely to desert them. The Arday scandal recalls earlier instances of powerful higher-ed and media institutions embracing convenient fictions, including the Duke lacrosse scandal (2006); NBC’s selective editing of George Zimmerman’s 911 call (2012); the “Hands up, don’t shoot” slogans and memes that circulated after Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson (2014); and, of course, the cockamamie Jussie Smollett hoax (2019). Social psychologists have written extensively about motivated reasoning and how we glom onto stories that confirm our beliefs and cast aside those that complicate them.

Despite their best efforts, neither the Times nor its rival newspapers could find a single Blood Brother. By contrast, Cambridge doesn’t appear to have even tried to verify Arday’s outlandish tales. To a normal person not obsessing about race relations every day, this can seem hard to fathom. “The warning signs were there!” we want to exclaim. But in both situations, the institutions were packed with likeminded people who found the stories simply too good to check.

That’s a dangerous place for any institution to be. The most important question for journalists and academics is not whether a story flatters our politics, our prejudices, or our ideals. It is the one that should have been asked in the Times newsroom in 1964, and at Cambridge six decades later:

Is it true?