Cooke, then 26, was one of the paper's rising stars. They think you're the kind of journalist the Post needs for its future because you understand people and you get part of their natures into your stories. Cooke told Woodward that if she disclosed the names of characters in her story, her life would be in jeopardy. Before the Cooke scandal, reporters routinely insisted on keeping the identity of a confidential source secret from their editors. In the post-Cooke world, most editors want to know the names.
Many papers try harder to check credentials too, particularly when credibility is in doubt.
Cooke said she had graduated magna cum laude from Vassar, earned a master's degree at the University of Toledo, studied at the Sorbonne, was an accomplished pianist, and spoke four languages. An hour's checking surely would have unraveled her fictional past, but nobody made the effort. All these reservations hovered in the background and never coalesced into a decision to spike a story so few staffers really believed. Race was a factor, if only because Cooke was describing a black inner-city reality that few of her white bosses knew anything about. The Post was under heavy pressure to improve coverage of its majority-black hometown.