Readers of the October 10, 2000 issue of the trade journal Business 2.0 will find an article on page 212 entitled "New Economy Saint or Sinner?" This article is a profile of the Reverend Jesse Jackson. At the bottom of the first page there is a byline tag reading, "WRITTEN BY TIM CAVANAUGH." At the bottom of the last page is a brief author bio of Tim Cavanaugh. I am Tim Cavanaugh, and I would like to make the following points clear:

* Although I did contract with the magazine to write an article about Reverend Jackson and his organization's Silicon Valley Initiative, the story printed in the magazine does not represent — and in fact directly contradicts — the reporting I did and the conclusions I drew in the two drafts I turned in to the magazine's editors. I argued strenuously to have my name removed from the article, but was told that this was impossible (although, as we shall see in a moment, this was not the case).

* In my judgment, the wholesale rewriting of this article — and the absurd doctoring of a photo of Reverend Jackson — were intended to discredit Reverend Jackson, to paint his public-spirited campaigns as Napoleanic debacles, and to depict his efforts at advocacy as incidents of extortion. The use of my name on the byline is intended to give an attack piece the surface legitimacy that attaches to a reported news article.

* For my unwitting role in allowing a magazine of deservedly marginal reputation to smear a prominent public figure, I apologize to the Reverend Jackson and to the many people at the Rainbow Coalition who cooperated with this story under the impression that they would be represented fairly.

To expand somewhat on the above:

Portions of my writing have been retained in this story. My first draft contained 4,500 words. The published article contains about 1,300 words, of which between 600 and 650 somewhat resemble words and phrases that appeared in my draft. The bulk of these passages are either direct quotes from Reverend Jackson or passages that were cherry-picked for possible negative connotations. In all, material adapted from my original drafts constitutes none of the article's first page, a portion of the second page, none of the third and most of the fourth.

If this were merely a matter of my material's being rewritten with a heavy hand, I would be content to grumble in silence. But what is at issue here is more than just editorial snafus such as "giveaways computers" or ungrammatical sentences such as "But Jackson's efforts to use private industry to bring about social change has been problematic," or even the fact that a person referred to by last name only on page four has not been introduced anywhere else in the article (evidence of the deep and violent cutting the story underwent). The problem is not careless editing, but malicious and scurrilous editorializing. Here are just a few of the terms and phrases which the editors saw fit to add:

But is this a true embracing of Jackson's so-called fourth movement or is it just a response to fear of being branded a racist corporation?

The Business 2.0 article also contains a lengthy passage concerning Reverend Jackson's dealings with the Boeing Corporation. Since this episode was interesting mainly as a precedent to the Silicon Valley initiative and did not concern the kind of tech/internet company that is Business 2.0's purported specialty, I referred to it in a brief, "to be sure"-type paragraph in my draft. The editors of the magazine, however, saw fit to expand this reference to constitute 25 percent of the article's length, with anti-Jackson quotations from named and unnamed sources (all without giving Reverend Jackson or his organization an opportunity to respond).

Although it is clear to me now that the magazine was mainly interested in an anti-Jackson screed, I wrote the story in the belief that I had been assigned to write a thoughtful and fair feature. My article, while realistic about or even slightly skeptical of the prospects for the Rainbow Coalition and its Silicon Valley initiative, dealt seriously with the problems this initiative seeks to address and accorded Jackson the respect he deserves as a long-time public figure and the most prominent American civil rights leader since Martin Luther King. None of this material has been included in the published story, nor was any of the reportage that resulted from my week of tagging along with Reverend Jackson, watching his organization in action, and interviewing scores of people, from CEOs to high school students to a cop. Again, the problem here is not with the quality or technique of the edit, but with the complete distortion of every word I wrote and every fact that I gathered.

As mentioned above, I urged the editors of Business 2.0 to remove my name from the piece. All of my counterproposals — to use an alias, to credit the story to "Business 2.0 staff," to use no byline at all — were rejected, and the excuse given was that, since the magazine had already been laid out (I didn't get to see the rewrite until it was in page proofs), it was too late to make any changes. ("The story has passed blue lines," was the explanation I heard.) I have worked at publications where we occasionally made changes to stories even after they had been shipped to the printers, and I know that although this is an expensive and inconvenient process, it can be done in emergencies (and I would certainly argue that it's an emergency when the author of a story completely rejects its contents). However, I am not in charge of the magazine's budget or editorial process, and I believed that, on this point at least, I was being told the truth.

However, now that the magazine is on newsstands, I see that an additional and very major change has been made to the contents. Specifically, a photograph of Reverend Jackson on the first page of the story has been modified so that there are now a pair of red devil horns coming out of his head (presumably so that none of the magazine's readers will miss the import of the or Sinner? line in the story's title). I have a copy of the page proof in which this picture appears normally. Thus, after I was told that the story could not be changed in any way — and in fact after I had argued that the article was already too scabrous an attack — the editors decided it would strengthen their story and their magazine's reputation to paint fake devil horns on a picture of a man who has been a respected public figure for four decades.

I have no idea what motivated Business 2.0 to perform such a moronic and juvenile prank. It is possible that the editors did this to embarrass me in retaliation for my audacity in asking that my name be removed from the story. It is far more likely that they merely wanted to try to embarrass Reverend Jackson, for reasons of their own. Both these points are moot, of course, since the editors have only succeeded in embarrassing themselves.

But no magazine has the right to use my name to further its inane agenda. Business 2.0 — one of those third-generation imitators of Wired — has lately been throwing an impressive amount of money at freelancers, and as a result it has attracted a higher caliber of talent than it deserves. But the magazine is a sad example of what happens when the vision and wit of the original (or for that matter the current) Wired calcifies into hackery and narrowminded invective. My own experience — which I hope is not typical — indicates that the magazine's troubles go beyond slipshod editorial quality and into serious breaches of acceptable journalistic practice. Since I have no control over Business 2.0's editorial policies, however, I must at least try to support my own reputation by stating once again that this story does not represent my views, my reporting or my conclusions about the Reverend Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition.