Calling to mind Jack Shafer (now at Reuters, formally Slate's media critic) on the problematic nature of narrative journalism:
http://blogs.reuters.com/jackshafer/2012/03/14/dismantling-t...
Whatever the case, the frequency of reported cases in the mass media is significant. Poynter has been tracking it for years; here are some of the reported cases from last year:
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/regret-the-error/156485/o...
Interestingly his show's run off broadway is scheduled through the 18th; anyone want to start a pool on that?
Remember James Frey (tricked Oprah and her staff).
He's doing quite well, see "current work":
There's Henry Blodget as well:
exactly.
James Frey lied about his own personal experience and Henry Blodget was involved in securities fraud. They are relatively unknown outside their industry.
Mike Daisey told lies that he presented to news organizations, blogs, etc. as facts -- for money and self-promotion at the expense of a well respected company. CNN, NYTimes, The Washington Post, etc. wrote articles based on Mike Daisey's lies. In my view this is similar to what happened to Dan Rather a few years ago. People will forget, but they will remember.
My understanding is that he settled when he was accused of touting stocks he didn't like. But I also understand that he actually lost a lot of money on such stocks.
He paid $4m in restitution to investors, but apparently the total amount of lost money that could be traced to his transactions was less than the interest on the $4m over the half-decade after the fine. So the case looks a lot more complicated than the capsule version.
By the time the novel was finished, Sinclair was convinced the pair were guilty; but he released it anyway because of its "higher truth".
I have always considered Truman Capote, Tom Wolf, Terry Southern and their ilk my heroes and sources of inspiration, even though I have been well aware of their use of composite characters and other "embellishments" that are frowned upon in modern magazines and newspapers. While I have never created a composite character myself, a couple of times I did describe a composite scene: say I had spent a week with my subjects and one night one of the characters made a remark at dinner, and the next night someone else said something else during dinner, I chose to recount those two events as taking place the same night during the same meal. I made that decision (which I'd discussed with my editor) becaue either the two events occured on two different nights randomly, and could have just as easily taken place on the same night, and I didn't want to interrupt the flow of the story or the reader's image of the scene, or, they may have been a good reason for these two events to have occured separately, but that reason was complicated, and explaining it would have detracted from the story. Did I do a disservice to the truth? I don't think so. Here's why.
To explain it in terms familiar to the readers of this forum, journalism is a "reverse problem". The journalist's job is not listing facts, but extracting a model of the truth from a sample set of observation data. This is a very difficult problem. In contrast to what many critics think, a good journalists must not only stick to "the facts", because the facts are simply a biased sampling of reality. Sticking to the facts is just like connecting sample points with lines - it's called overfitting and it's as gross a mishandling of the truth as negligent interpolation or extrapolation is. Neither sticking to facts nor "completing" them is "the truth". A good journalist is one who is able to recreate a good model of reality, a fine approximation of it, by relying on observed facts as well as on gut instinct and genuine emotion, and who's able to convey the model as clearly as possible to his audience, introducing neither outright fabrications nor irrelevant and confusing facts.
Um, no. your observation of the facts is biased. It's important that we accept that subjectivity lies within ourselves.
To extend your model, you're conflating direct data collection/experimentation with literature assessment, and essentially saying that's acceptable. It's not.
A journalist interviewing an expert (academic, or other specialist) is analogous to the literature review in a research context: you do not have direct observation, but you are assuming that peer review and other mechanisms have ensured the literature is grounded in direct observation.
A journalist recounting first-hand experiences or recounting those of people he/she has interviewed is really doing direct data collection or experimentation: the reason you try to get multiple sources for a significant claim is precisely why scientists run experiments multiple times.
A journalist claiming second-hand experiences as first-hand is equivalent to claiming to have observational data when in actuality you are relaying the conclusion of another experiment.
Take this neuro-toxin example: it happened to N people, but by claiming to meet them personally, he's implying it happens more often but is covered up, which would mean the real prevalence is higher (when in reality, we have no evidence that they are).
Or take the suicide rates. By claiming concentration via personal experience, the claim is contrary to what we know through more rigorous data collection, which is that the rates firm-wide are lower than for the Chinese population in general.
Also, the problem of your metaphor is you presume that the model f(observed facts, gut instinct, emotion) yields more valid inference than the sum of multiple journalists' f(observed facts). This is crap. If f(gut instinct, emotion) skew systematically -- a more reasonable conclusion than the counterfactual -- then no, your approach is less valid.
Nassim Taleb had a nice bit about how he doesn't read the news; instead he reads textbooks or other long-production-cycle reports. This is because, he says, the frontier of knowledge doesn't change very often. So what you get in the news is a fundamentally biased sample of only the outliers (which sells papers) and never the consensus that is generally 99% of the body of knowledge.
And just to make sure: I'm not claiming that a longer, more careful and more rigorous observation does not yield a more accurate approximation. I'm just responding to a common complaint against journalists that if only they would stick to what they've actually observed and can prove that would necessarily produce better journalism; this is wrong.
And as for Nassim Taleb not reading the news, only textbooks - well, I don't have a problem with the first part, but if the obsessive, anal Mr. Taleb insists on only the most rigorous sources for learning about this world, than he has a very limited soul, indeed.
Actually, I've learned a lot of interesting things about the startup culture (specifically that of Silicon Valley) from reading HN comments (seriously, it's fascinating). There's probably a story there, one that hasn't been told yet.
A lie is still a lie.
Journalists report. Pundits opine.
You're one, or the other. You cannot be both. Or act like one while claiming to be the other.
No journalist should lie, even pundits, and it is indeed a reporter's job to report rather than opine, or, as I prefer to call it, "pass judgement". However, even when reporting, and especially in long-form non-fiction pieces (be it a magazine feature or a documentary film) it is is the unintelligent reporter who limits his audience's perspective to the clearly observable facts. The camera, as the saying goes, truly does lie, if only because the viewer cannot see what lies beyond its field of view. The mere selection of which facts to report (as you cannot report all of them unless you want to turn your audience into reporters) is the first act of building a model of reality. A lie is indeed a lie, but sometimes just reporting a few facts is a bigger lie (i.e. a worse approximation of reality) than completing the picture with the experienced reporter's gut instinct. It is not the reporter's job to pass judgment - that is indeed the realm of the pundit - but it is his job to reconstruct a good model of reality.
A reporter is not supposed to be merely a sensor, transcribing measurements. It is his job to try and extract meaning from those measurements as well; meaning, though not judgement. When you actually go out in the field, there is valuable meaning that you just sense even though you can't waive a piece of hard evidence to support it. A reporter that decides to spare that meaning from his audience betrays both his audience and the truth.
You might say, well, if that's the case, two reporters going out there might tell a very different story. That is true. That would also be true if both were simply reporting the hard facts. That would be true even if they both were to place a camera and let it stream images directly to your screen without any human intervention.
Hypothetical Mike Daisey who takes pride in his decisions: "I use a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell the story, and I do so with integrity."
Actual Mike Daisey who knows he's full of shit: "It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story, and I believe it does so with integrity."