Sylvester The Caught

It's been a while since we've had a nice, juicy journalism scandal, hasn't it? Well, schadenfreude aficionados, you're in luck: Nick Sylvester, the precocious hipster music critic for the Village Voice and Pitchfork Media, fabricated material in a Voice cover story. "Sylvester says he met at a New York City bar with three TV writers who had flown in from L.A. to test their updates of pickup techniques from Neil Strauss's book, The Game," according to a Voice editor's note. "That scene, as Sylvester now acknowledges in the statement below, never happened."

Sylvester, like Janet Cooke, Jack Kelley, Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass before him, will now forever be tied to that greatest of journalistic sins: fabrication. And one is left wondering what, exactly, he was thinking. I don't mean just from a journalistic ethics standpoint, though I'm sure I don't need to tell anyone that making stuff up for stories is, like, wrong. More to the point: How does anyone, in this day and age, think they can get away with it? As CBS News learned during Memogate, the Internet has connected us to the point where critics can seize on a misstep nearly instantaneously. That's not to say we live in an era free of journalistic sin – far from it. But technological innovation has made it pretty damn hard to get away with an outright fabrication, which is a pretty good reason not to do it, if ethics ain't enough to sway you.

Sylvester may yet recover – rumor has it that the critic was pushed into doing a reported piece, something he wasn't quite ready for, and the powers that be may or may not eventually chalk his sin up to youthful indiscretion. (For now he's been suspended from the Voice.) His brief mea culpa, if you're interested, has been posted on the Voice Web site, under the editor's note.