Banality of Fictions, The

Policy Review, Aug/Sep 2003 by Wallace-Wells, Benjamin

WORSE, HOWEVER, is that to readers of the New York Times or the New Republic or most other ambitious journalistic outlets around the country, Glass's or Blair's stories would not have seemed out of the ordinary - at least in one important way. Over the past quarter-century, newspaper and magazine journalists, who have come to see themselves in competition not only with other newspapers and magazines but also with television, radio, the internet, books, movies, and all other ways in which people spend their time, have made it a priority to tell better stories. The anecdotal lead, which gives a visual scene to illustrate an article's larger point, has become universal (anecdotal leads also account for nearly all of Blair's and Glass's fabrications). But the leads need to make a vivid case for the story - if the story is about, say, the failures of welfare reform, the struggling former welfare recipient the author starts with had better be really, vividly struggling - and so the nuance of these characters tends to be lost.

After I left college, I spent about two-and-a-half years as a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer's metro desk. I filed countless stories with these sorts of leads. Again and again, my editors - deeply talented, frequently prize-winning journalists - asked me to go back and try to find a stronger anecdote. It's very good, they'd tell me, but can't we find someone who makes our case a little more strongly? In other words, can't we find someone whose life exactly echoes the abstract idea we're trying to convey in the piece? Can't we find someone whose life has been stripped of nuance and then write about it?

The problem is that journalists have come to expect and value cliche. Trying to make imagery vivid and turn big ideas into intellectually manageable sound bites has mostly made journalism better, but the effort has sacrificed some needed nuance. Jayson Blair could not have told a more complex story about Palestine, West Virginia without visiting it. All he had to rely on, writing from Brooklyn, were secondhand cultural stereotypes. Stephen Glass, inventing characters from thin air, necessarily battered them into two dimensions; for them to be more nuanced, he would have had to meet them. They were able to get away with their fabrications for as long as they did because they met their editors' expectations, which in turn tells us that those who supervised them simply did not expect enough.

THE Times and the New Republic have said, in their own defense, that it would have been nearly impossible for any newspaper or magazine to preempt the fabrications of reporters so willfully bent on lying as Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass. To a certain extent, that's true, and Glass, in a section of The Fabulist in which he describes how he duped the New Republic's fact-checkers, shows why: Even the most rigorous checkers, without the resources to go out and re-report each and every story, always reach a point where they simply have to take the reporter's word for it.