[elliekelly]

If you’re willing to answer a question a bit beyond the scope I have one that relates to your story but also to your experience as a journalist. It seems like grifters often rely on “reputation laundering” through reputable news & media. They get one small-time outlet to say they’ve done XYZ and then they finagle that into more coverage because the next outlet sees the prior one has reported the grifter has done XYZ so they report on it, too. And on the one hand it seems perfectly reasonable for a journalist to say well XYZ has been reported in all of these reliable publications so it must be true because otherwise someone would have caught it by now. But sometimes, as it seems happened with Richard Walter, it turns out they’ve all just sort of confirmed with one another but no one has actually given XYZ a proper look.

So I guess my question is to what extent do you think this happens because the fraudster deliberately manipulates/exploits the free publicity vs some reporters, for whatever reason, failing to do enough due diligence? Are there any sort of journalistic ethical obligations around “confirming” a fact with an infotainment type of outlet compared to a news outlet? Your story specifically mentions 20/20 as one of the first “big” news outlets that bolstered Walter’s false reputation. (And even now that I’m thinking about it I’m not really sure whether that’s meant to be news or not!)

And I don’t mean to single out journalists here. It’s clear the legal profession bears significant blame for the reputation laundering he was allowed to do through his “expert” testimony. I only ask about the journalism angle specifically because you happen to be a journalist. I’d also love to hear the perspective of any litigators who might be inclined to weigh in.

[DaveHerbert]

Good questions. Journalists often rely on the previous reporting of their peers. If newspaper reporters, who work on tight deadlines, needed to fact check every single word in a story, they'd never publish anything. Instead, they check an old NYT story, confirm the details as previously reported, and move on.

This reasonable instinct can also give way to a broader laziness in reporting, though. Existing narratives are repeated verbatim, and we forget to go back to the bare facts and ask "what really happened, here?"

In this case, I saw the official narrative that the press had reported for 40 years. And then I saw scattered breadcrumbs that told a very different story about Richard Walter. I followed that trail, and here we are.