"I was once a tomboy who grew into a mini-diva. Kind of like a butterfly blossoming from its cocoon." ~ Liane MembisAn aspiring journalist has been busted for faking sources. Liane Membis has been busy trying to scrub herself off the interwebs - her about.me is gone ... as is her twitter account, which was Lili (@limembo) "a wordsmith with a heart for social change. Words fly frequent miles. Always doc 'em. 2011-12 Miss Black America ..."
Did Membis consume too much Nutella? She admits to being obsessed with the stuff. Or maybe she was inspired by the great black female hoaxer Janet Cooke, who won a Pulitzer Prize for a story she fabricated!
Will she come clean and "confess" in her online magazine? After all, she is the Creator and Editorial Director of Liberette.
Hopefully, Liberette is making some dough: Membis is no longer working at The Wall Street Journal." As always in these cases, it happened more than once.
"Liane Membis was an intern for the Journal for less than three weeks and wrote or contributed to five published pieces — one of which has been removed from our online archives and two of which have been edited to remove quotes that were provided by the intern and that cannot be confirmed," a spokesperson told Politico. The two other articles can be see here and here, both alerting readers that quotes were "attributed to names that couldn’t be independently verified."
All of Membis' body of works is now hanging in the balance. Membis has also written articles for the Huffington Post, CNN, and Ebony.
The lazy Membis isn't a lone-phoney: Poynter reports that "Paresh Jha, an award-winning reporter for Hearst Newspapers’ New Canaan News in Connecticut, has been fired for fabricating sources and quotes in at least 25 stories over the nearly two years he worked at the weekly."
Wall Street Journal Gets Jayson Blair'd By Intern
Membis Racist? Forum commenters take turns bashing Membis over this CNN article (which may be taken down before the day is over).
Tags: Liane Membis, Liberette
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