Just as there's a law against criminals profiting from books about their crimes, there should be one against journalists profiting from books that explain and excuse their ethically criminal forays into fiction.

Anybody remember Little Jimmy, the eight-year-old heroin addict who won Janet Cooke a Pulitzer before he turned into a "composite" character? Cooke gave back the prize and (at least to my knowledge) had the grace not to write a book about what she did. But that was so long ago. . .

Compared to Finkel's $500,000, (which Shafer says he believe he "earned") Jayson Blair was a piker. His book advance was said to be in the $100,000 range. Finkel got half a million dollars for his book? There are thousands of hard-working journalists the country over who wouldn't dream of doing what Finkel admits doing, let alone writing about it. Maybe Finkel's prose is sterling. Maybe he used to be a gifted journalist, and he made a lot of friends at a lot of magazines. But he wrote fiction disguised as fact, sold his editors and his readers a bill of goods, and for that he gets $500,000 to rationalize his actions?

How does a disgraced journalist pay his debt to his profession and to his readers? That's a question Michael Finkel appears never to have asked himself. He's been too busy "earning" his way back to to an unsuspecting public's good graces, thanks to too-forgiving editors who are more concerned about poor Michale than their readers.

Jeremiah Horrigan / New Paltz NY