The Writer’s Choice

This article, in a slightly altered form, originally served as the keynote address at the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies/Medill Alternative Journalism Writing Workshop at Northwestern University.

Once upon a time I knew a young woman who was smart and beautiful, talented and hardworking. She reported well and wrote gracefully. She was, like everybody I knew in those years, ragingly ambitious. On the day that this promising and engaging woman—Janet Cooke—would be forever banished from the Washington Post and American journalism for having made up her Pulitzer Prize-winning story about an eight-year-old heroin addict, I came to the Post newsroom early in the morning. The place was nearly empty when I sat down at Janet’s desk to do what any aspiring literary journalist should do—report. I took out a pad and began jotting notes on what was before me:

• • A bottle of pink Maalox.

• • A snippet from a Jackson Browne song: “Nobody rides for free . . . nobody gives you any sympathy . . . nobody gets it like they want it to be . . . nobody, baby.”

• • These words: “There is no therapy for whatever ails a good reporter like the challenge of an impossible assignment”—with “impossible assignment” underlined.

• • And this aphorism: “Some people know what they want long before they can have it.”

As I had expected, at 12:24 p.m. on April 16, 1981—I know the time and the day because I also jotted them in my notes—two burly men arrived at Janet Cooke’s desk, cleaned its top and its contents into cardboard boxes, and rolled them away on a metal dolly. The infamous Janet Cooke was gone.

Well, not exactly.

You are living with her ghost—and her descendants and ancestors in fakery. Jayson Blair of the New York Times, a most astonishingly brazen faker known to all of you because his crimes are recent and led not only to his downfall but to the sad downfall of Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, Numbers 1 and 2 at the Times. Stephen Glass of the New Republic, who five years ago was caught making up not only quotes and scenic details but entire human beings, businesses, legislation, even products—a Monica Lewinsky inflatable doll that recited Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” That took fakery and creativity. Michael Finkel, who invented a West African teenage slave for the pages of the New York Times Magazine. Patricia Smith and Mike Barnacle, fallen columnists of the Boston Globe.

In the scholarly world—the Journal of the American Medical Association admitted that med student Shetal Shah’s account of an old Alaskan villager killing himself by walking out into the frozen Arctic was a fake. In book publishing the examples are nearly endless, depending on how you define “fake.” Binjamin Wilkomirski’s 1995 memoir, Fragments, in which Wilkomirski, as a child, watched his mother die in a Nazi concentration camp. Too bad he was actually Bruno Grosjean, a Christian raised in foster homes in Switzerland. The “rounding” of the “corners” to which author John Berendt admitted after the publication of his nonfiction bestseller Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, a Pulitzer finalist. In a strangely unconvincing defense, Berendt said, “This is not hardssnosed reporting, because clearly I made it up.”¹

Faking it for art’s sake has a long tradition: Truman Capote’s made-up scenes for In Cold Blood; John Hersey’s then-unacknowledged creation of a single character carved from the lives of many World War II vets in his famous 1944 Life magazine piece “Joe Is Home Now”; George Orwell’s recreation of multiple events as a single scene in The Road to Wigan Pier. And, let’s be honest, newspapers of the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries that were famous for never letting the facts get in the way of a good story.

Finally, perhaps most frightening, the rise of the personal memoir as a profitable book form in the last twenty years has fostered some of the most bizarre, through-the-looking-glass logic about what is and isn’t truth in what’s loosely...