Fail Up (13 page)

With our livelihoods on the line, Tom urged our audience to stay tuned: “It's Thursday; Tavis is on today. You'll want to hear this commentary. It may be his last.”

Rather than check CompUSA that day, I felt that I had to address the radio network. ABC Radio had violated our First Amendment right to free speech as far as I was concerned. If this commentary was in fact going to be my last, I'd at least lose my job standing on the truth. In my mind, there was no other choice.

The show wasn't canceled. No doubt, the decision had something to do with the thousands of calls, e-mails, and faxes that flooded ABC and CompUSA. Enraged Black folks all across the country shut down ABC Radio's phone system that day in New York and CompUSA's phones in Dallas.

The ABC Radio standoff convinced CompUSA's executives that we were committed to the cause. The following week, the company called for a meeting. A few weeks later, it had hired a Black- and Hispanic-owned agency and made a multimilliondollar commitment to advertise in Black and Hispanic media markets. CompUSA's then Chairman, Jim Halperin, came on my radio program. Although he maintained that his company never engaged in “no urban dictate,” Halperin apologized to our audience for not aggressively reaching out more to all customers.

Further, Halperin appealed to other CEOs, asking that they never underestimate the power or the value of minority consumers: “It's a shame this took us off track for a while. I want to sell computers to anyone who walks in the door.”

Ironically, just when we were settling our dispute with CompUSA, the company was acquired by a Mexican corporation. Executives at the company, who had dismissed the Hispanic market for years, wound up answering to Hispanic leadership.

Life can be funny that way.

A Huge Price to Pay

In the end, everything worked out. But that doesn't erase the fact that I put my credibility on the line, and my failure to do my homework could have torpedoed a very powerful advocacy campaign.

That was almost 15 years ago. Today, because the Internet can amplify our slipups exponentially, sloppy mistakes can not only end your career; they can destroy the professional and personal lives of many others as well.

Remember Jayson Blair,
The New York Times
reporter who was disgraced in 2003 after it was discovered he had plagiarized work and made up stories and quotes? Blair, when asked by his editors to produce travel receipts for a story-related trip, quickly resigned with a brief apology for his “lapse in journalistic integrity.” But even with his departure, the scandal grew; in-house investigations ensued and reputations were ruined. The Blair scandal led to the resignations of the
Times
Executive Editor, Howell Raines, and its first Black metropolitan editor and managing editor, Gerald Boyd. Although some
Times
officials blamed Blair's ruse on their desire to help an affirmative action candidate succeed, ultimately there was no reasonable excuse for the editors who failed to fact check Blair's plagiarized or fabricated stories—numbering at least three dozen—between 2002 and 2003.

“Rick Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize–winning
New York Times
journalist, also resigned after accusations arose that an article published under his byline and datelined Apalachicola, Florida was based on the experiences of and interviews conducted by a freelancer. Bragg claimed this practice was routine procedure at the newspaper.”

There's also no excuse for NAACP and White House officials and dozens of journalists who rushed to judge a dedicated and innocent professional who wound up defamed and forced out of a prestigious government job.

In June 2010, conservative Website publisher Andrew Breitbart posted an excerpt of a speech delivered by Shirley Sherrod, a Black U.S. agriculture official. The heavily edited video gave the impression that Sherrod was a racist. The post became “breaking news” on FOX and other news networks. The NAACP quickly repudiated Sherrod, defining her words as “shameful, intolerable, and racist,” even though she was speaking at an official NAACP event.

In less than 24 hours after Breitbart's incendiary post, truth came to light. In the full video, Sherrod actually explains how she came to grips with her own biases and learned to help poor people (“Black, white, and Hispanic”) who were denied access.

In fact, the farmer that she allegedly discriminated against came to her immediate defense on national television. The day after Breitbart released his tape, Roger Spooner—the “white farmer” Sherrod supposedly discriminated against—appeared with his wife Eloise on CNN's
Rick's List
. They called those smearing Sherrod “racists” who “don't know what they're talking about.” The Spooners said Sherrod did “her level best” to help them save their farm, which she ultimately did.

The urge to use the Internet to skirt hard work is increasingly prevalent on college campuses. To stem the growing trend, dozens of online detectors such as Plagiarism.org and
turnitin.com
have been created and employed in academic circles. But young people are innovative and technology is accommodating. Just as there are programs designed to detect plagiarism, sophisticated software has been developed to help plagiarize.

The problem in an increasingly technological society is that we can unknowingly create lies and distortions at a tremendous cost. As Rush Limbaugh's case illustrated, it's easier than ever to access information, but it's also easier to broadcast inaccurate information.

The way news travels at light speed these days, anybody can be bamboozled, run amok, or led astray. It happens all the time. If you say the wrong thing and it's discovered, it can reflect badly on you and, with the Internet, that bad reflection can be on display for an eternity.

It's not just media people. If the White House with all its resources and the venerable NAACP can get tripped up, so can the average Joe. Whoever you are and whatever you do, it's important to think about the consequences of slipshod work.

We have to check ourselves before we wreck ourselves. Don't let laziness or irrational exuberance burn you. My situation with CompUSA involved both. But it taught me a critical lesson about doing my homework. There is no substitute for diligence and double checking all the facts. Developing the discrimination necessary to avoid taking everything at face value and promptly acknowledging and correcting mistakes publicly are equally essential skills.

Believe me; I work hard every day to make sure I'm not sidelined by inadequate preparation. In today's media landscape, there's no guarantee that you can bounce back from the backfire of hasty or ill-conceived work. Just ask Dan Rather. “Do your homework” is not just a motto. It's also a lesson for survival.

CHAPTER 9

LOOSE LIPS
CAN SINK SHIPS

W
e were very, very young and very much into each other. She was well known in Hollywood circles and I was an up-and-coming assistant to Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley. This story is a tad intimate, but the details are necessary.

To put it delicately, in the afterglow of amore, we mused about our past lovers—contrasting their virtues, peccadilloes, and hang-ups. She revealed details about a former lover's sexual proclivities. There was no malicious intent; it was just innocent pillow talk—at least it was supposed to be.

I'm not going to give the man's name. Let's just say he is very bankable in Hollywood. In fact, he's the sort of guy I would love to have interviewed in my later years and gotten to know better. Unfortunately, as this story will illustrate, that will never happen.

Fast-forward a few months after the bedroom conversation; I was hanging out with a few of my buddies. As testosterone-burdened males often do, we were engaged in braggadocious, bawdy locker-room one-upmanship. Well, in the midst of this unbridled raunchiness, the name of my girlfriend's ex-lover surfaced. Being the absolute Neanderthal that I was then, I chimed in: “Well, I heard this about him and I heard that … ” and I proceeded to discuss the guy's sexual secrets.

Unbeknownst to me, someone in that group was also a friend of the man I was disparaging. When he repeated the exact details that I had shared—the ex was no dummy. He knew exactly who had spread the information. He called my girlfriend, gave her an earful, and told her that she needed to keep her mouth shut about his business.

Needless to say, my girlfriend went totally off on me. The breach led to our eventual breakup. I cared about her deeply. The tragedy of this story is that my indiscretion severed one promising relationship and prohibited another from ever getting started. What's ironic is that her former lover and I would have gotten along famously, I'm told. In fact we share mutual friends.

To this day, Mister X will not come on my show. He's never expressed a reason why, but I know. Twenty years have passed, and all I can say is that I still feel incredibly small about that unfortunate incident.

I remember being down on myself and telling Big Mama the whole story. Being totally embedded in truth, she said my girlfriend and her former lover had every right to be upset with me. I had no business running my mouth about their business. “Let this be a lesson to you,” she said. To accentuate her point, she shared a classic Big Mama witticism:

“Baby, there's 24 hours in the day—12 hours to mind your own business and 12 hours to leave other folks' business alone.”

In Other Folks' Business 24/7

Rumormongering is as old as the art of communication. But in contemporary society, gossip—as a tentacle of the world's most powerful source of communication—has become a blood sport. As an article in
The Christian Science Monitor
a few years ago pointed out, the rumor mill is abuzz with chit-chat about “celebrity slipups and the personal misdeeds of government officials.” With the Internet, such chit-chat has increasingly become a gross invasion of privacy for voyeuristic satisfaction and financial compensation. You don't have to be famous or accomplished; just have an affair with someone who is.

The man I badmouthed is a noted personality. Two decades later, I am now considered a personality, subject to rumormongering and blogosphere gossip. Now I'm on the other side where people constantly run their mouths and blog rumors about my personal life, thoughts, and motivations as if they really know me. Today, I really understand how that gentleman must have felt all those years ago.

Don't get me wrong. Every morning I take my “big boy” pill. Yet increasingly, I find myself reflecting on that long-ago incident and how much easier and more damaging it is these days when people run their mouths and dine on other folks' business.

Several celebrities I've interviewed over the years swear that they never read anything about themselves on the Internet. For a long time, I didn't think they were being totally honest on this count. As I became better known, I read everything that was written about me. I now understand. If you take in that garbage on a continuous basis, it becomes toxic. You find yourself getting emotional, angry, and tempted to respond, which—and let's be honest—is exactly what the professional antagonists really want.

This is not to say that some celebrities, by their antics, don't invite speculation and gossip. They do. But people outside the public eye don't really understand that well-known folks are real people, too. It's not easy grappling with the surreal feeling of impotence and vulnerability when constantly caught up in swirls of rumor, innuendo, and gossip without any effective recourse.

Existing in the spotlight means you have to adjust to the glare. It took me awhile to adapt, but I don't pay that much attention to what's said about me online. I'm surrounded by people whose job it is to protect and grow the brand. They are always aware of what's being written or said about me, and they let me know when I should pay attention.

That works just fine for me.

But this chapter isn't really about celebrities or me. It's about something much more dangerous.