Poynter comes down hard on ‘This American Life’ and its unique brand of storytelling journalism.
He thought that China was so exotic and far away that it was uncheckable; that it was okay to take “a few shortcuts in [his] passion to be heard.”
(That’s a cliché too, of course, borrowed from every fabulist since Janet Cooke.)
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Evan Osnos explains in this New Yorker post that Mike Daisey’s fatal mistake was assuming he was the Christopher Columbus, so to speak of China business reporters. Ira Glass’ fatal mistake may have been exactly the same.
And who’s Janet Cooke? She’s the Washington Post fabulist from the early 1980s who also believed her fiction could not be fact checked. The story of her very swift rise and fall is here.
Where do we draw the line between irresponsibility and poetic license?
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How much accuracy and authenticity is a non-fiction author permitted and where is it okay to take liberties large or small?
“The Lifespan of a Fact” is the record of a fact checker’s increasingly exasperated attempt to hold an author to a basic standard of accuracy and what the New York Times calls “the author’s increasingly defensive attempt to make him feel primitive for believing in something so superannuated.”
Their discussion on WNYC’s “On the Media” is a fast-paced and fascinating back and forth for anyone who has wondered about or struggled with the superfine line between fact and non-fiction.
