In our modern era, it’s easy to make the case that journalism is dead. In a time when we constantly hear phrases like “fake news” and “alternate facts” it’s good to know that some people are still doing their best impressions of Veronica Mars and digging in to get the story straight.
Case in point: A group of intrepid high school journalists who believed that everything wasn’t as it appeared with their new principal. Turns out they were right.
“She was going to be the head of our school, and we wanted be assured that she was qualified and had the proper credentials,” Trina Paul, a senior at Pittsburgh High School in Kansas City, told the Kansas City Star. “We stumbled on some things that most might not consider legitimate credentials.”
What they found was that the new Principal, Amy Robertson, had some pretty questionable degrees hanging on the proverbial wall (not her literal wall, that would give away the scam!). What tipped Paul and her fellow reporters off? For one thing, the college Robertson listed on her resume (where she purportedly received her Masters and Doctorate), Corllins University sounded as fake as Hogwart’s School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
During their searches, the savvy students couldn’t find Corllins listed as a legitimate, accredited school. Instead, they discovered that their new principal had gone to a degree factory. After learning all of this information, the students published the story on Friday. It quickly caught the eye of the board of education who decided to begin their own formal investigation. This eventually lead to Robertson resigning from her brand new $93K/ year job at the school.
What’s the moral of this story? In this age of information available at our fingertips (literally), there’s really no way to pretend to be someone else. In the pre-internet days, you could just fluff your resume to get a better jon than you deserved. Those days are gone — Google searches don’t lie.
