"It always starts with something true."

To round off the series of blog entries for this assignment I thought it'd be nice to tie together a handful of threads that have been discussed in class and in this blog throughout the semester. Looking back over the last 13 weeks, I've learned a lot about the nature of truth in journalism and more specifically, the potential for distorting the truth. Obviously, there was In Cold Blood, but beyond that I've worked through a bunch of other secondary books this semester and while some don't strictly belong to the literary journalism genre, all reports indicate that they ring very true of the times and places their authors were aiming to illustrate.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero, Hunter S. Thompson

's Hell's Angels, Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, etc.

I've mentioned most of those books in previous posts, so for now I want to focus on Hell's Angels. It's a book I've been meaning to read for years, but only got around to last week. It's generally accepted that Thompson was best known for setting the world on fire with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but before that book came along and blasted holes through the zeitgeist of modern literature, there was Hell's Angels. The reason I feel that this one is worth mentioning is because once I was no more than ten pages into it, I'd realised that it was a prime example of what the best pieces of literary journalism do. That is, it was telling a story that, at the time, the media had no interest in telling properly.

The Hell's Angels had been demonised by the media, fashioned into "all-American bogeymen," as Thompson put it. Then, after spending a year in their midst and writing it all down, along came Thompson with the book that not only catapulted him into the ranks of literary rebels, but also largely demystified the Angels of the mid-60s.

Throughout the book, Thompson frequently mentioned that while the media didn't always fabricate stories about the Hell's Angels and sometimes did stick to the facts, there was still issues with emphasis that distorted the overall truth in the stories.

Speaking of messing with the facts, let's talk about The Wire.

When I first got back from the US in January, I was unemployed for longer than I care to think about, but during that time I had the chance to smash through the first four seasons of the show, but didn't get around to the fifth season until just before the start of this semester. Anybody familiar will the show will attest to its astounding quality and will also be well aware that the fifth season focuses heavily on the role of newspapers and media in "the Game." The entire series deals with the issues of corruption and moral ambiguity in all facets of life in Baltimore, and in season 5, it's the newspapers that are in the producers' sights.

The quote I've used as this post's title comes from an episode when a city editor at the Baltimore Sun, Gus Haynes, confronts his superiors over the authenticity of wunderkind journalist Scott Templeton's investigation into a series of bogus homeless murders. Haynes reasons that it's too convenient that Templeton's always in the right place at the right time to catch major breaks in the story, citing real life journalists like Stephen Glass who got busted for fabricating their stories. As Haynes said, "it always starts with something true," but the journalists who always land the big stories seem to get more and more liberal with their interpretation and representation of the truth.

It got me thinking about when the extent to which it's acceptable to use creative licence in journalism, and while I understand that there's very little room for it in traditional day to day news reporting, literary journalism does call for some degree of creativity. But what are the limits to that creativity?

Capote was accused of fabricating certain scenes in In Cold Blood, and also faced accusations of inaccurate reportage, given that he never took notes or recorded anything during interviews. But if the core of the story remains true, does it really matter?

I understand that the most idealistic journalists stand for nothing but the truth and wouldn't dream of even tidying up a quote, let alone fabricating any details, but when it comes to literary journalism and what is required to journalists to produce a quality literary piece, is it really that big a deal if not every single tiny detail and quote are represented verbatim? We've already established in class that creative wordplay and structure are vital elements to a good literary piece, so as long as you're being creative in that regard, why not get creative with how you tie all of these facts and quotes together? That being said, I understand it's never acceptable to just make up major parts of the story for the sake of entertainment.

In the end, I feel that literary journalism has more potential to act as a catalyst for societal change than traditional news journalism does, purely because with literary journalism, the author can explore so much more of the story.

The article about the Clutter family massacre that inspired Truman Capote to write In Cold Blood was a mere 330 words long. Capote's years of research yielded around 8000 pages of notes. Straight away, you can see that although the journalism business is (or at least, should be) so concerned with telling the truth, there is always more truth to be told in a story than the confines of newspaper columns allow for. In Cold Blood triggered widespread debate about patients being mentally unfit to stand trial, as well as debate about capital punishment in Kansas, a debate that still runs today.

I don't need to say anything more about the ethics of manipulating truth in journalism, because by this point in my degree I'd just be repeating myself for the trillionth time. Instead, I'll finish with this thought: I think that the primary concern of literary journalists should be telling a story that's important enough to be a public issue, and telling it well enough to change how they think about it.

Pornoviolence.

There’s no getting around the fact that In Cold Blood has had vast amounts of praise heaped upon it since its release in ’66, but as with any work that stirs as much controversy as Capote’s seminal piece of literary journalism, it has also attracted its share of criticism and controversy.

Among those who leveled criticism at the novel was a fellow pioneer of the New Journalism movement (which subsequently led to literary journalism), Tom Wolfe. While Wolfe has certainly acknowledged the merits of what Capote achieved with In Cold Blood, he also raised some interesting points about its subject matter in one of his essays, entitled, Pornoviolence.

With Pornoviolence, Wolfe made a point of criticising the media for its habit of glorifying violence as a means of gratifying its audience, similarly to how pornography does with sex. In Cold Blood was among the texts to be criticised in the essay, with Wolfe writing: "The book is neither a who-done-it nor a will-they-be-caught, since the answers to both questions are known from the outset ... Instead, the book's suspense is based largely on a totally new idea in detective stories: the promise of gory details, and the withholding of them until the end."

Throughout my research into literary journalism I've read plenty about it being a style of writing that allows for a lot more description and detail than traditional news journalism does, but until now I haven't given much thought to when those details become gratuitous.

I'll admit that while I was reading In Cold Blood, even though I had a vague idea of what had happened to the Clutter family, I was eagerly waiting for Capote to lay out all the details. Has my predilection for slightly "edgier" entertainment conditioned me to react like that? I dunno. Wolfe's words have had me thinking about the issue though. At what point do the details of a violent crime become excessive in any form of journalism, literary or otherwise? The classic saying is, "if it bleeds, it leads," but where is the line drawn between respectable reporting and tasteless exploitation? I don't doubt that if you compared the coverage of a violent crime between a broadsheet and a tabloid you'd notice some stylistic differences.

Having given it some thought in the case of In Cold Blood, I don't think that the explicit details of how the Clutter family was slaughtered were in any way gratuitous, as they were a vital element of understanding Perry Smith and what he was capable of. Having said that, I do wonder if it was absolutely necessary, from a journalism perspective, to withhold the details of the crime for so long and continue to tease the audience as the story unfolded. Granted, it was an excellent narrative technique but when you consider it from the standpoint of journalistic necessity, Wolfe's argument is certainly not without credibility.

Given that my literary piece will focus on the lives of those are frequently confronted with horrific human injury, this does have me giving more consideration to how much detail I'll be using in describing the darker details.

A name forever tainted.

I've often wondered how it'd feel to be one of those people who has had such a detrimental effect on mankind that their very name is tainted with irreparable disgrace. I don't imagine it'd feel all too excellent. And I'm talking real, obscene, heinous disgrace here, the sort that would make most people very reluctant to bestow a similar name on their child. I mean, I don't imagine there are too many little Adolfs or Saddams or Osamas running around the schoolyard these days.

Then there are guys like Charles Ponzi, a guy who swindled and cheated and scammed people with gusto so steadfast that his surname has since become synonymous with dishonesty.

But what of the guys living just slightly in the shadows of guys like Ponzi? Men, who, despite being total scum on all accounts, manage to slip under the public radar on account of another guy being just that little bit worse than they are.

Such is the case of Marc Dreier, the subject of a recent Vanity Fair piece. In an age where money is often perceived as the one true God, you kind of get the feeling that the white collar criminals of Dreier's ilk have become our latter-day Antichrists.

But while so many news outlets are preoccupied with crucifying the likes of Marc Dreier and, the man who stole (among other things) his spot in the limelight, Bernie Maddoff, this article's author takes a somewhat more tasteful approach. Rather than portraying Dreier as some sort of inhuman greed incarnate, we're instead presented with a portrait of a man who had an absolutely unwavering determination to succeed. Burroughs specifically mentions Dreier's 50th birthday, a time that is a critical moment of reflection and assessment in the lives of many men. For Dreier, this day was a landmark in his meteoric rise to success and its ensuing collapse.

A desire to succeed is something that almost every man and woman in the world can relate to, but for Dreier it evolved from ambition to hubris. Of all the flaws in his character, this one was the most significant, being almost Shakespearean in magnitude. Still, the fact remains that in this detailed, thoroughly researched and well-written piece of literary journalism, Burrough has presented Dreier as a very human character and as a man that many of us can relate to on some level, whether we like it or not.

Perhaps most importantly, Burrough did not neglect to mention that with his residences around the world and hundreds of millions of dollars at his disposal, he could have run at any time. Instead, he stuck around to face what was coming to him. I'm quite sure how I'd describe that choice. I'm very hesitant to say that sticking around to face his punishment was admirable or honourable, because a man like Marc Dreier has forfeited any right he ever had to have those words associated with his name. 

Instead, I'm just going to say that it was the right thing to do, and leave it at that.

Through the looking glass.

While I haven't looked too extensively into the relationship between Truman Capote and Perry Smith I'm told that it went above and beyond the typical interactions of journalist and interviewee. Some say their relationship was only one of platonic friendship, others think that intimacy may have been involved. Either way, thinking about it has had me considering something over the past few days: At what point is the journalist in too deep?

I understand that your typical news journalist is meant to keep their distance from a story: Investigate, observe, report, move on. But in the course of reading the prescribed texts for this subject and exploring other material, it only becomes more apparent over time that literary journalism transcends what we typically expect of reporting the news.

In discussing a journalist's involvement with a story going from objective to subjective, I'm not really thinking about the Hunter S. Thompson style of deliberate immersion within the subject matter. Rather, I'm thinking about the times when a journalist is swept into the vortex of his or her story without ever intending to get to that point.

Recently I watched David Fincher's Zodiac again, the 2007 adaptation of Robert Graysmith's book of the same name. In typing that last sentence, I originally wrote "...of Robert Graysmith's novel or the same name," quickly deleted, unsure if novel was really the write word to use. Certainly it's an entertaining story, more entertaining than a lot of novels out there, but more than anything the book is an account the infamous unsolved murders in San Francisco that took place during the 1960s and 70s.

What I find most interesting about the story is that Graysmith, whose involvement with the case not only caused the end of his second marriage but also led to him receiving a handful of death threats, didn't start out as an investigative journalist at all. At the start of the Zodiac days, he was a newspaper cartoonist. How does a man go from that, to being in way too deep with a serial murderer investigation?

Just as Woodward and Bernstein's lives were in jeopardy during the Watergate scandal and just as Capote may have gotten closer than he should have to Perry Smith, Graysmith jeopardised his personal safety for the sake of a story. What does it mean when a journalist becomes a key element of the story they're investigating, particularly when that story has potentially dangerous implications for them? Is it really worth it? These men have been behind some of the most acclaimed pieces of literary journalism ever written, but does the end really justify the means?