Travel writer Thomas Khonstamm has admitted that he either plagiarized or just plain made up a bunch of the stuff he wrote for the “Lonely Planet” travel guidebook series. He says that he broke company policy by taking free travel (presumably from travel companies whose services he was reviewing, though the story doesn’t say). He even claims to have written stuff about Colombia without even going there, relying instead on information from a girlfriend who worked at the Colombian consulate in San Francisco.
Well, hell, I can do that. If I knew you didn’t have to be a travel expert to write travel guides, I’d have tried my hand at it years ago. Of course, I actually have done a fair amount of traveling. In my travels, though, I’d say I came across many things that I couldn’t even make up. So I’d have to go the honest route and, you know, actually go to the places I would be writing about.
But one thing this story shows is how you can’t necessarily trust those who hold themselves out as experts. There seems to be so little vetting or oversight. I mean, apparently nobody would have caught Mr Khonstamm (which sounds awfully similar to “con man”) had he not come out with a book in which he admitted his deeds.
Anyway, the expert tag gets handed out with a bit too much frequency these days. In my profession, when we call “expert witnesses” to testify about something, there is a whole pile of evidentiary and legal standards we have to meet in order to qualify our “experts” as bona fide experts. You have to establish that they have training, expertise, and that that their opinions on the subject have some kind of grounding in fact or accepted theory.
Not so for Mr. Khonstamm, it seems. And not so out in the real world beyond the courtroom, either. Lots of people get to be experts on all kinds of things, without any guarantee that the “expert advice” you’re getting is based upon reliable information or an acceptable amount of training or experience. For example, I have an acquaintance I’ve known for a few years who apparently fancies himself a relationship expert, who even had a column running in an actual local newspaper. Oh, he would often, in his columns, coyly pretend to shrug off the title of “expert.” But ask yourself: how many newspapers would waste precious column-inches for “some guy who really isn’t an expert in the subject being discussed, but wants to prattle on about it anyway”? (Granted, that’s a good way to describe this blog sometimes. But I’m not asking people to pay to read it, either.)
Anyway, despite the coy, and not altogether too strident, attempts to make it look like he’s not the presumptuous type of guy who would label himself an “expert” on relationships, he would often “quote” other people who described him as (good God) the “Male Carrie Bradshaw” (the relationship-expert-columnist protagonist of Sex and the City fame). The columns themselves, however, were less “male Carrie Bradshaw” and more the print version of the high-school/college guy who wears the very thinly veiled sensitive-new-age-guy disguise to try and get women into bed with him. Except not even as well-written as that. Oh, sure, to people who didn’t know much about the guy, and who didn’t read too much below the syrupy, very-easy-to-see-through veneer, this guy looked like the in-touch-with-his-feminine-side progressive man. It was easy to get caught up in the tale of a guy who got his heart broken time after time by women who didn’t appreciate him for the nice, sensitive guy that he is.
Except, that’s not really how I knew/know the guy. To get the full picture, you have to see the side that wasn’t in his column. You have to see the guy who’s several years older than me (I’m in my early thirties) who surrounds himself with women in their early- to mid-twenties (some of them are younger than my girlfriend’s youngest sister, who is in her early twenties). If you go to his page on one of a number of social networking sites, that’s what you see—scores of much-younger women in his friends page. You also have to see the guy as I saw him when I first met him—married, with an infant daughter, pocketing his wedding ring, and making the rounds of every female at our office in search of one who would be receptive to his advances. I had friends who knew him in other contexts, and that seemed to be his M.O. in other contexts as well. (Suffice it to say that I wasn’t shocked to learn of his divorce a couple of years later.)
My reaction, when I learned of his column, was mixed — I wasn’t sure whether he had no business playing the sensitive “metrosexual” relationship expert dude, or whether he ought to be considered an “expert” because he had done just about everything a guy shouldn’t do if he expects to have and preserve a long-term relationship.
Of course, you didn’t see any of that in his column. You rarely saw a mention that he had ever been married, and you didn’t really see him talking about having a kid. Because if you’re a late-30s guy trying to get sweet young twenty-somethings under your spell, you can’t be some old divorced dude with wandering eyes, a flexible definition of commitment, and a kid. No, what you saw was a guy who latched onto some kind of “metrosexual” persona to show how in touch with his feminine side he was. He would always lament his failed relationships with some girlfriend or another, and the theme would always be “poor me, these women just don’t know how to deal with a nice guy in touch with his feminine side.” It was certainly never his fault. It probably had little to do with the fact that he could be sometimes be seen literally hanging all over other women.
He would also post his columns to a running online blog for the rest of the world to see. Most of the comments that showed up were from the segment he likely aimed for — women who don’t know any better who always fell for the guy who had the thinly veiled nice-sensitive-guy act. Every once in a while, someone who did know better would throw the bullshit card, but such comments either disappeared or were buried under a back-pedaling act that politicians could take lessons from. Indeed, once the guy had the gall to post a syrupy-sweet column about how he had never had a girlfriend on Valentines Day, and how he longed to know what that was like. That’s right, the guy who was married for several years. Posting about how he envied people who had “someone special” to spend Valentines Day with. Someone posted a comment throwing the bullshit card on that one, too. I could only imagine what his ex-wife might have thought when she read that. I can only imagine what his child will think if she ever stumbles across it.
Eventually, he posted a column saying no one would get to kick him around anymore because his column was leading to too many problems dating because his status as a “relationship expert” put “too much pressure” on his dating life. I suspect it had a little more to do with one too many bullshit cards being thrown. Of course, as those of you who are cynics like me might guess, it wasn’t very much longer before he started posting again, despite saying he’d never do it again.
Anyway, my point is that it’s all a little too easy to become known as an expert today, and consequently, not too surprising to see that so-called experts are just making things up and phoning things in. If an ardent womanizer can cast himself as a soulful “relationship advice columnist” in seek of his one, true love and lamenting the fact that a nice guy like himself keeps getting jilted, then surely there can be travel writers who never travel to the places they write about. The problem is, people don’t seem to care. Oh, sure, they act surprised when the cat’s out of the bag, but really, what do they really do to check whether the guy dispensing travel advice or advice for the lovelorn actually has anything backing up his opinions?
On the other hand, what do I know? After all, I’m no expert.
