The opening sentence is a stunner, wrapping emotional arms around the reader: “Jimmy is 8 years old and a third-generation heroin addict, a precocious little boy with sandy hair, velvety brown eyes and needle marks freckling the baby-smooth skin of his thin brown arms.”

The remaining 4,221 words hit as hard as the heroin that destroyed the lives of Jimmy’s mother and stepfather and were sure to ruin the boy’s. The depictions of Jimmy’s abuse and heroin injections at the hands of adults-turned-monsters by their addiction are emotionally kneecapping.

The article, published on the front page of the Washington Post 43 years ago next month, is not exceptionally well-written or insightful, but it doesn’t need to be: the story is sufficiently gruesome to tell itself. Through Jimmy, the author, D.C.-beat reporter Janet Cooke, takes the reader on a stomach-churning journey of a new drug devastating American inner cities and ruining children therein.

The piece hit when the country was just coming to realize the depths of the heroin and free-base cocaine problem plaguing its inner cities. The article revealed the hard truth of children’s exposure to hard drugs. In seeking the presidency in the election scheduled two months after the publication of “Jimmy’s World,” Republican candidate Ronald Reagan argued for an expansion of the War on Drugs handed down from Richard Nixon. Reagan sought to drive the Silent Majority — White suburbanites terrified of Black drug addicts — to the polls.

Most Washington Post readers were educated Beltway residents; they did not live in inner cities and had only a peripheral notion of the problems associated with heroin and free-base cocaine. “Jimmy’s World” opened their eyes to the size and scope of the crisis.

On September 28, 1980, when the piece ran, the Post was riding high after its coverage of Watergate brought Nixon low. “Jimmy’s World” demonstrated the power of the publication, contextualizing an urgent social ill. The piece was an immediate sensation, the subject of broadcast news coverage that evening, reprinted in hundreds of papers around the country the next day. The mayor of D.C. publicly committed to finding Jimmy (he never did). Nancy Reagan commented on the tragedy of the boy’s abuse. “Jimmy’s World” went viral decades before that term existed. Once in office the following year, President Reagan used the article as evidence of the need for a more aggressive War on Drugs.

It was not until seven months later, April 1981, when Janet Cooke was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, that the story was revealed as a hoax. In fact, it fell apart in less than a full day of fact-checking. Virtually every aspect of the piece collapsed under the most basic scrutiny. Jimmy never existed, and no editor had ever bothered to see if he did.

The revelation caused a national stir. Cooke was forced to forfeit her Pulitzer — the first and only time the award was returned. The Post offered multiple apologies and conducted multiple post-mortems. Of course, the expansion of the War on Drugs was already underway and never looked back.

While the article and the resultant controversy are largely forgotten, the fiasco forced changes in American print journalism that remain important today, most notably requiring reporters to reveal their sources to editors on sensitive stories.

In the analysis, what was revealed to have gone so horribly wrong here is not a lack of editorial oversight but rather the opposite: a burning desire by the top of the newspaper to believe that one of its beat reporters broke a story personalizing such an important American social issue. The story was so visceral, so personal, and so sensational that Executive Editor Ben Bradlee and Managing Editor Howard Simons overlooked the two giant red flags within the piece: the fact that Jimmy was remarkably eloquent for an 8-year-old, particularly an 8-year-old heroin addict, and the idea that adults would openly inject a child with heroin in front of a news reporter.

In the frenzied rush to continue the paper’s upward trajectory, these two brilliant, legendary newsmen could not see disconfirming evidence. In so doing, the Post failed its readership.

Print journalism is a critical American institution, and the Washington Post — along with the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and regional newspapers — underpin American society by holding the powerful to account. In the words of late 1800s Chicago newsman Finley Peter Dunne, American newspapers serve to “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.”

Yet, the newspaper is run by humans, and humans have flaws, cognitive biases among them. When newspapers fail, we all do as well. Erroneous print reporting led the United States into a disastrous buildup of forces in Vietnam, a misunderstanding of the Tet Offensive, a Red Scare, a largely unnecessary buildup of nuclear weapons against a nearly bankrupt Soviet Union, and a search for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The failures of American print journalism include leading social misunderstanding of the 1980s crack epidemic, misreporting of the post-9/11 anthrax scare, and the erroneous predictions of the 2016 presidential election.

We must treat reporters and editors with the grace we all deserve; they are, after all, mainly seeking to illuminate the truth for the country. But, we must examine when they get it wrong. We must mine events such as “Jimmy’s World” for lessons we can apply today.

At a time when anyone with a social media account is considered a journalist, it is critically important that the newspaper upholds rigid editorial standards. It is critical, too, that we, as consumers of their product, hold editors and reporters to account.

Today, 43 years after its publication, “Jimmy’s World,” offers relevant lessons. Among them: editors and reporters are, by and large, an ambitious group. That ambition must held in check in search of accuracy. Editors must ruthlessly and constantly reflect on their own cognitive biases. The truth, after all, is too important to get it wrong.

Joe Buccino is the author of the coming book “Burn the Village to Save It,” about the 1968 Tet Offensive. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

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