Once upon a time, when school shootings were unheard of, a working journalist I knew agreed to teach a news-reporting class to college students who had just watched All the President’s Men. The entire class wanted to become a Robert Redford or Dustin Hoffman.
As an exercise in observation, the journalist had a half dozen of his newsroom buddies stage a mock hostage taking. Masked copy editors armed with their children’s toy guns stormed the lecture hall where he was teaching. But halfway to his lectern, they all stopped and then quickly fled the room. Once they were gone, the journalist calmed his students and told them he had played this little prank to create a big teaching moment.
“Quick,” he said. “How many were there? What were they wearing? Did you see their weapons?”
“12! 8! 5!” They shouted all at once. “Trench coats! Army fatigues! Jeans with hoodies! “Hand guns! Sawed-off shotguns! Automatic weapons!”
The journalist didn’t have to say a word. The students themselves had made his point: The objective facts of any situation can be distorted by one’s perspective, imagination or a combination of the two.
That’s why the reliability of eyewitness testimony at trial is often questioned.
It’s why consumers of news should know the bias of the networks they watch. In today’s highly polarized political environment, there are enough facts available on any given issue for ideologues on either side of the left-right divide to cherry pick them to fit their preconceived notions.
The fact that facts are routinely distorted through one prism or another is also why there always will be a place for fiction in our culture. In fact, it’s never been a stronger vehicle for telling the truth about what’s really going on.
Making shit up
I once knew another journalist who was adept at coming up with just the right quote to make the subjects in his stories come alive. As his editor I marveled at his uncanny flair, until I had occasion to call a source to check on something attributed to him in a story the journalist had left for me to edit while he went off on another assignment.
The source clarified his position and said the account was mostly accurate — “especially since I never even talked to your reporter.”
When I saw said reporter next, I confronted him with “making shit up.” He shrugged and said, “I didn’t have time to call the guy and I knew what he’d say anyway.”
What he did was clearly a violation of journalistic ethics. But were he writing with the license of a novelist, he could have told an even more comprehensive and honest story containing facts that the source he never talked to knew to be true but would never dare share.
Of course, I’m not making a case for shoddy journalism. I’m just recognizing the limitations of the fourth estate, which is in such disrepute for its widespread ineptitude in handling the truth. There are too few independent news outlets and too many forces intent on shaping the news agenda to suit their self-interest. We have less enterprise reporting and more pack journalism that force-feeds us a steady diet of boilerplate narratives that lack the intellectual protein of any new facts.
That’s why I find myself turning more and more to fiction — written and broadcast — to get a check on reality. Sadly, I gain more insights into our criminal justice system from one episode of Law and Order, for example, than from a week’s worth of crime reporting on local television.
Why? Because sometimes, the only way to get at truth is to “make shit up.”
