The Post-Truth Era by Ralph Keyes

Author:Ralph Keyes [Keyes, Ralph]
Language: ita
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2004-10-14T22:00:00+00:00

Creative Journalism

In a newspaper’s worst nightmare, twenty-seven-year-old Jayson Blair fabricated or plagiarized so much material in 673 articles he wrote for the New York Times over four years’ time that his employer was forced to publish a fourteen-thousand-word review of Blair’s transgressions. This front-page article portrayed in painful detail how many times Blair had reported apocrypha as “facts,” pretended to be places where he wasn’t, and borrowed material written by other reporters.

This problem was not the Times’s alone. During a period of heightened vigilance following Jayson Blair’s dismissal, many other newspapers fired reporters who had fabricated or plagiarized material. The most egregious case involved Jack Kelley, a star foreign correspondent at USA Today. During two decades’ time, Kelley’s vivid reporting from hot spots such as Iraq, Bosnia, Chechnya, Israel, and Cuba earned him five Pulitzer Prize nominations. His gripping eyewitness account of a suicide bomber who blew up a Jerusalem pizza parlor nearly won that award. This story was one of many that USA Today subsequently determined was largely imaginary. (Kelley had described three decapitated heads of victims rolling around the street, their eyes still blinking, something that simply didn’t happen.) The newspaper’s investigation revealed that their reporter not only fabricated material in one story after another, but, once challenged, wrote scripts for friends to follow when pretending to have been his sources.

During agonized postmortems of such episodes, editors and colleagues tried to figure out how these transgressions could have happened. Were they due to a star system that favored charismatic go-getters like Kelley and Blair? A lack of oversight on the part of overworked editors? Or was it a craving for “wow” journalism on the part of editors who suppressed warnings from others and doubts of their own to get great copy?

What seldom showed up in public consideration but did among journalists themselves was the pressure they felt to make their reporting not only accurate but dramatic, and with coherent story lines. On these terms they were not just to report the news but tell a great yarn in the same amount of time that they used to spend just reporting the news. Reporters were supposed to be both Ed Murrow and Ernest Hemingway. Along the way, the reconstructed scene, the imagined conversation, the getting inside the head of your subject, migrated from the pages of books and magazines to those of daily newspapers. “The most ambitious feature stories are expected to emulate the best short stories,” journalist Don McLeese warned in the Austin American-Statesman well before the Jayson Blair episode, “—with the same sharply etched characterization, psychological motivation, evocative description, narrative momentum and moral purpose. Journalists who have spent an hour or two with someone offer the illusion that they have peered through the depths of the subject’s soul—and that the reader can as well.” Something had to give. Too often it was accuracy.

Obviously this emulating of fiction needn’t entail making up news copy out of whole cloth. Under pressure to dramatize their stories, however, some journalists decided that this was the best way to go.

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