- Jay Paul/Getty Images
- The discredited Rolling Stone story about rape in a UVA frat house reinforces the undesirability of pseudonyms.
If you come across a pseudonym in a news story, do you distrust the entire story? Blogger Steve Buttry—who’s a visiting scholar in the communications school of LSU—titled a recent post “When should journalists use pseudonyms in stories? Never.” I thank Charlie Meyerson for bringing it to my attention on Facebook.
I’m not sure what the hard and fast difference is between a serious story and satire. Royko’s Slats Grobnik columns were funny, but his columns without Grobnik were just as funny. Royko at his most serious was funny. Someone might say of satire that you know it when you see it. But it’s more true that you see it when you know it. Lots of readers never see it: they wouldn’t recognize a satirical sentence if it hit them between the eyes with a dead fish. So instead of allowing pseudonyms, but only as a tool of satire, what if we keep journalism neat and unconfusing by ruling out satire too? If anything might perplex anybody—out it goes.
Instead, I made up names. Unfortunately, there were a lot of names to make up, and while trying to keep track of who everybody now was, I wound up calling one student by the name he actually had. He was horrified. So was the friend who’d set up the meeting, who I assumed would never speak to me again. I made the case that the most impenetrable disguise of all is a pseudonym that wasn’t pseudo. That’s probably true, but the words felt lame as I said them.
“‘Tawny freshman with flashing orbs’ would get the job done,” says the reporter.
