"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.