CJR March/April 2006 - The Predictable Scandal

Here's an interesting article about the publishing industry and the truth.
CJR March/April 2006 - The Predictable Scandal:

Joyce Johnson, a longtime book editor, writing teacher, and memoirist, told Patrick Reardon of the Chicago Tribune, “In a good literary memoir, you’re basically rendering the essence of the experience. Whether someone is called Jane or Susan, who cares?” On other occasions, Johnson has urged memoirists to “exercise imagination.”

Yet the abandonment of accuracy, of evidence, indeed of truth, is not a case of memoir exceptionalism. Though there are distinctions between the various examples, works of history and narrative nonfiction, such as Edmund Morris’s Dutch and John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, freely reveled in similar liberties, doing little damage to the authors’ literary standing and commercial appeal. One can only assume that some editors, publishers, and literary agents privately despair about their profession’s abdication of the entire concept of nonfiction. But only a scant number of them have been willing in the wake of the Frey affair to say so on the record.

One need only compare book publishers’ evasions and justifications to the reactions of news organizations that have been faced with transgressions similar to Frey’s. The disclosures that Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley fabricated elements in their articles led to the fall of the top editors of The New York Times and USA Today, respectively. Both newspapers conducted extensive, penetrating self-examinations to determine what had gone wrong and how the failures could be kept from occurring again. It is inconceivable, hilariously implausible, that The Washington Post would reissue Janet Cooke’s invented portrayal of an eight-year-old heroin addict because it was so well-written and touched on a “larger truth.” Yet very interestingly, some of the same reporters who have been defrocked — David Brock, Michael Finkel, Blair — have been welcomed by the publishing industry with six-figure book contracts. Fame and notoriety, which ought to be antonyms, have become synonymous...