For anyone who's ever wondered about awards and whether the recipients of same truly deserved them, I have for you a rather shocking example of how someone pulled a fast one on a publication called Wine Spectator. Robin Goldstein (as "part of the research for an academic paper . . . about standards for wine awards") invented a restaurant called "Osteria L'Intrepido" (Goldstein said it was "a play on the name of a restaurant guide series that I founded, Fearless Critic"), complete with bogus Web site and menu, and submitted it to Wine Spectator for award consideration. The phony restaurant won Wine Spectator's Award of Excellence, and Goldstein writes about this hoax (or research, depending on how you look at it) here.
Needless to say, the people at Wine Spectator weren't happy. Thomas Matthews, the executive editor, called Goldstein's stunt a "publicity-seeking scam" and an "act of malicious duplicity," while attempting "to set forth the actual facts of the matter." The actual facts would seem to be that Wine Spectator was bamboozled, hoodwinked and made to look foolish and possibly a bit less diligent in its investigation of potential award winners than it could have been. But, in fairness, it also appears that Wine Spectator relied in good faith on the restaurant owner's warranty "that all statements and information provided [in the application] are truthful and accurate." (In short, they f---ed up, they trusted them.) And Matthews enumerated the "significant efforts" it took "to verify the facts." (Efforts that didn't include talking to customers or going to the restaurant, but as Matthews points out,"We do not claim to visit every restaurant in our Awards program. . . . We assume that if we receive a wine list, the restaurant that created it does in fact exist." Well, you know what they say about assuming . . .)
What do I think about this? I think Robin Goldstein is looking for publicity--you'll notice in his article about the hoax that two of the first things he mentions are his book and his Web site; he then goes on to flog his restaurant guide series--and he could rightly be thought of as a liar (on the award application, if nothing else) and a jerk (to put it politely). However, he does seem to have made a point about the rigor with which such contests are judged.
However, I can't help but feel some sympathy for Matthews when he writes: "It has now been demonstrated that an elaborate hoax can deceive Wine Spectator.
"This act of malicious duplicity reminds us that no one is completely immune to fraud. It is sad that an unscrupulous person can attack a publication that has earned its reputation for integrity over the past 32 years. Wine Spectator will clearly have to be more vigilant in the future."
Clearly, if sadly, Wine Spectator not only should be more diligent from now on, but should have been more diligent in the first place. And there were very easy ways (for an information professional) to have exercised greater diligence than the magazine did here. Given that Wine Spectator's "significant efforts to verify the facts" relied heavily on information found on the Web, I think this story is a cautionary tale about relying too much on the Internet for research and not scrutinizing more carefully how reliable a source is before depending on it to verify anything.
My advice to Matthews: next time, have your librarian (and here's where I get to put in a major plug for the special librarian) or fact checkers do news searches for reviews of the short-listed award contenders in known publications like Gourmet and other big trade or consumer magazines. Or check the public records for a business name filing for the restaurant. These are just a couple of top-of-the-head suggestions--fairly basic steps that any magazine's librarian or fact checker could handle.
You need to check sources more independent and reliable than the purported restaurant's Web site and something like Chowhound, where (like Amazon) anyone could post anything, even if they don't know what they're talking about. And, if you find absolutely nothing from an independent source about the entrant, red flags should be flying.
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