著名的假新闻――《吉米的世界》(1)
2007-06-06 11:32阅读：
只要谈到假新闻，没有哪本书不谈这个案例，找了很久才找到这个原文，贴在这里，供有兴趣的人研究。
JIMMY'S
WORLD
Janet Cooke
Washington Post
Staff Writer
September 28, 1980; Page
A1
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.
He nestles in a large, beige
reclining chair in the living room of his comfortably furnished
home in Southeast Washington . There is an almost cherubic
ex<x>pression on his small, round face as he talks about life
--
clothes, money, the Baltimore Orioles and heroin. He has been an
addict since the age of 5. His hands are clasped behind his head,
fancy running shoes adorn his feet, and a striped Izod T-shirt
hangs over his thin frame. 'Bad, ain't it,' he boasts to a reporter
visiting recently. 'I got me six of these.'
Jimmy's is a world of hard
drugs, fast money and the good life he believes both can bring.
Every day, junkies casually buy herion from Ron, his mother's
live-in-lover, in the dining room of Jimmy's home. They 'cook' it
in the kitchen and 'fire up' in the bedrooms. And every day, Ron or
someone else fires up Jimmy, plunging a needle into his bony arm,
sending the fourth grader into a hypnotic nod.
Jimmy prefers this atmosphere to
school, where only one subject seems relevant to fulfilling his
dreams. 'I want to have me a bad car and dress good and also have
me a good place to live,' he says. 'So, I pretty much pay attention
to math because I know I got to keep up when I finally get me
something to sell.'
Jimmy wants to sell drugs, maybe
even on the District's meanest street, Condon Terrace SE, and some
day deal heroin, he says, 'just like my man
Ron.'
Ron, 27, and recently up from
the South, was the one who first turned Jimmy on.'He'd be buggin'
me all the time about what the shots were and what people was doin'
and one day he said, 'When can I get off?'' Ron says, leaning
against a wall in a narcotic haze, his eyes half closed, yet
piercing. 'I said, 'Well, s . . ., you can have some now.' I let
him snort a little and, damn, the little dude really did get
off.'
Six months later, Jimmy was
hooked. 'I felt like I was part of what was goin' down,' he says.
'I can't really tell you how it feel. You never done any? Sort of
like them rides at King's Dominion . . . like if you was to go on
all of them in one day.
'It be real different from herb
(marijuana). That's baby s---. Don't nobody here hardly ever smoke
no herb. You can't hardly get none right now
anyway.'
Jimmy's mother Andrea accepts
her son's habit as a fact of life, although she will not inject the
child herself and does not like to see others do
it.
'I don't really like to see him
fire up,' she says. 'But, you know, I think he would have got into
it one day, anyway. Everybody does. When you live in the ghetto,
it's all a matter of survival. If he wants to get away from it when
he's older, then that's his thing. But right now, things are better
for us than they've ever been. . . . Drugs and black folk been
together for a very long time.'
Heroin has become a part of life
in many of Washington's neighborhoods, affecting thousands of
teen-agers and adults who feel cut off from the world around them,
and filtering down to untold numbers of children like Jimmy who are
bored with school and battered by life.
On street corners and
playgrounds across the city, youngsters often no older than 10
relate with uncanny accuracy the names of important dealers in
their neighborhoods, and the going rate for their wares. For the
uninitiated they can recite the color, taste, and smell of things
such as heroin, cocaine, and marijuana, and rattle off the colors
in a rainbow made of pills.
The heroin problem in the
District has grown to what some call epidemic proportions, with the
daily influx of so-called 'Golden Crescent' heroin from Iran,
Pakistan, and Afghanistan, making the city fourth among six listed
by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency as major points of entry for
heroin in the United States. The Golden Crescent' heroin is
stronger and cheaper than the Southeast Asian and Mexican varieties
previously available on the street, and its easy accessiblity has
added to what has long been a serious problem in the nation's
capital.
David G. Canaday, special agent
in charge of the DEA's office here, says the agency 'can't do
anything about it because we have
virtually no diplomatic ties in that part of the world.' While
judiciously avoiding the use of the term epidemic, Canaday does say
that the city's heroin problem is 'sizable.'
Medical experts, such as Dr.
Alyce Gullatte, director of the Howard University Drug Abuse
Institute, say that heroin is destroying the city. And D.C.'s
medical examiner, James Luke, has recorded a substantial increase
in the number of deaths from heroin overdose, from seven in 1978 to
43 so far this year.
Death has not yet been a visitor
to the house where Jimmy lives.
The kitchen and upstairs
bedrooms are a human collage. People of all shapes and sizes drift
into the dwelling and its various rooms, some jittery, uptight and
anxious for a fix, others calm and serene after they finally 'get
off.'
A fat woman wearing a white
uniform and blond wig with a needle jabbed in it like a hatpin,
totters down the staircase announcing that she is 'feeling fine.' A
teen-age couple drift through the front door, the girl proudly
pulling a syringe of the type used by diabetics from the hip pocket
of her Gloria Vanderbilt jeans. 'Got me a new one,' she says to no
one in particular as she and her boyfriend wander off into the
kitchen to cook their snack and shoot each other
up.
These are normal occurrences in
Jimmy's world. Unlike most children his age, he doesn't usually go
to school, preferring instead to hang with older boys between the
ages of 11 and 16 who spend their day getting high on herb or PCP
and doing a little dealing to collect spare
change.
