Mohammed Islam is a very smart teen from Queens, New York. The 17-year-old attends the very prestigious Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan and apparently had a lot of people fooled into thinking he was part time stock trader worth around $70 million.
New York magazine’s Jessica Pressler caught wind of the story and thought she had found a serious scoop. She wasted no time in corralling Islam and getting him to tell her about how he went about amassing a fortune, even though he hadn’t thought about a prom date yet.
However, she should have spent more time vetting his story out because it was all a big fat lie — Islam made it all up. As a journalist, I understand the pressures to out-scoop the competition, and Islam blames his snowballing on the pressures put on him by Pressler.
I’ll cut a 17-year-old kid a break, even though he should’ve known better. But what about Pressler and all the others in the media who drank her Kool-Aid?
And how are you calling yourself an investigative reporter if you don’t really investigate the story? A lot of others in the industry have called her out, saying it should have been very easy to find the falsehoods in Islam’s tale. Nevertheless, Pressler defended her side of the story to the end, even as Islam capitulated.
Pressler was supposed to be getting a posh position over at Bloomberg, but that news organization’s reputation for complete accuracy in fact-checking is pretty well known. It’s hard to say what the outcome will be. From the look of her now-redacted tweets, she’s seems a bit rattled, for sure.
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