All Intensive Purposes

Mark Bowden:

Here’s an important rule about journalism: Reporters do not make things up because they have done too much work..., but because they have done too little.

Truth is never less interesting than fiction, and is usually more so. All of us go through life with a general idea about people, places and events that we’ve never seen. That general idea is based on guesswork and is tainted by presupposition, bias, received wisdom, etc., etc. Real reporting replaces such guesswork with a solid, firsthand account, and in my experience nearly always demonstrates that what we thought was true was wrong, in ways large and small. Our world and the people who populate it are infinitely various and complex and are always changing, so a truthful account of anything ought to be, by definition, surprising. That’s why reporting has inherent value: There are things fiction can do that journalism cannot, but truthfulness is the thing journalism has over fiction. A made-up general or prostitute can offer me many things in the hands of a great writer, but it cannot replace the intrinsic value of a well-drawn portrait of the real thing. When a writer embellishes reporting with his imagination, whether by creating composites, rearranging the sequence of events or inventing dialogue, he creates something that is not just a fraud, but which is less than either fiction or fact.

From a review of The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion and the New Journalism Revolution, by Marc Weingarten, in the December 26 edition of the The New York Observer. (That link won't be good for long.)