The Thin Line Between News and Fiction

The Associated Press recently fired a "reporter" named Christopher Newton after learning that he had invented people and institutions for his articles for two-and-a-half years. Imaginary sources at imaginary and real organizations and universities provided quotes so boring that no one paid much attention. As Jack Shafer at Slate has pointed out, it wouldn't have made much difference if the sources had been real.

I used to work as a reporter, and editors would often ask me to get a quote from a source, specifying to various degrees what the quote should be and who should say it. I currently work as a communications coordinator for an organization, and reporters sometimes call and ask me to agree to a quote. More often they ask questions in order to get the type of quote they want for a preconceived article.

Editors are writing stories based on what they think they already know. Reporters are then pretending to do the research to produce the stories. Sources are pretending to provide the information. Citizens are pretending to read the news. This charade, this systematic avoidance of actual reporting, is being carried out in the name of "objectivity," or the "balance" of "giving both sides." And this is the case quite regardless of whether the sources are real.

There is good reporting going on as well. I saw it done and like to think I did some of it as a reporter. And many good reporters now ask me open-minded questions. They are honestly trying to learn something and have not yet determined the shape of a particular article.

I don't know Newton's motives. He may have been as much pressed for time as intent on embarrassing his editors at the AP. (Thoughtful reporting is not easy to produce in 20 minutes.) While he didn't show the creativity of fiction-as-journalism star Stephen Glass or of the novelist Robert Musil who did nature reporting by inventing animals, Newton did show particular in-your-face chutzpah by packing an article on the difficulty of lying with an inordinate number of lies. Can he not have been smirking?

Perhaps (probably not, but it's nice to imagine) he planned to reveal the deception himself in the way that the scientist and would-be philosopher Alan Sokal some years back revealed in Lingua Franca that he had published what he considered sheer gibberish in a postmodern journal. Whether he meant to or not, I think Newton scored a more significant indictment of journalism than Sokol did of contemporary thought. Postmodernism suffered from such openness to radical creativity that it couldn't spot nonsense. Journalism is so closed to insight that it can't spot utter vacuity.

Look at the tautological headlines that Jay Leno holds up for laughs ("Droughts Result in Low Rain Fall"). Look at the nightly attempts on television to produce "analysis" of daily murders, sports scores, and weather ("Acquaintances believe he was a troubled young man," "The way I see it, if we could have scored four more points we would have won," "This was the hottest day recorded on this date, but that's not really a surprise given the high temperatures we've been experiencing.")

After I worked as a newspaper reporter, for a short time I wrote for two newsletters at a company called the Bureau of National Affairs. One newsletter, called Union Labor Report, was mailed to labor unions. The other, called Bulletin to Management, went to "human resource managers," which I put in quotes because I refuse to view humans as a resource and refused to adopt many of the viewpoints required by BTM. I was supposed to write up similar stories in two very different ways for these two newsletters, with little concern for new insights or even accuracy, but a lot of concern for "balance," which meant quoting representatives of more than one union in ULR and more than one manager in BTM, and in no case expressing a personal opinion.