News That Isn't Worthy

To be fair, one should never read a memoir thinking that every detail is reported exactly as it occurred. When it infamously emerged that portions of the memoir were fabricated, however, the fallout had an emotional piquancy, too. More to the point, one would never want to read such a memoir. Pulling a story from the density and ambiguity of real life would probably be impossible otherwise. The initial success of Frey’s fabrication of parts of his life shows again how effective the media’s exploitation of the idea of honesty can be. And what we also see, again and again, is how tolerant we as media consumers are of this exploitation. Reality television’s synthetic reality is apparent to the critical eye, yet its success endures. The use and abuse of the truth brand is not the limit of media dishonesty. Works that use the label reality or based on true events generally retain at least some link, albeit tenuous, to real occurrences, but recent years have seen numerous instances of outright deception. Indeed, some in the media have deceived the public to such a degree that James Frey seems by comparison like a paragon of honesty. Jones, garnered immediate critical praise. She writes with a keen sense for the telling anecdote, recounting how she prepared crack to pay her family’s bills, how she received a handgun for a birthday.

Get Out of Your Own Way

As mentioned above, memoirists typically exaggerate certain details in their works, and some reviewers noted that Love and Consequences had passages that seemed to border on the novelistic. But it turned out that Jones’s work didn’t just borrow some of the methods of fiction. She was raised by her biological family in Sherman Oaks, an upscale section of the San Fernando Valley, and she had no affiliation with gangs or with selling illegal drugs. In admitting her deceit, Seltzer claimed that Love and Consequences was in fact based on the experiences of friends she’d known growing up. For whatever reason, I was really torn and I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to, she told the New York Times. However altruistic her motives, Jones’s deception is of a different order than what you would get from a night of reality television. In fact, despite her defense, it’s probably reasonable to compare Seltzer’s act with some of the more insidious forms of deceit we’ve discussed, such as lies with intent. After all, she gained both literary fame and fortune through her deceit. Yet what is even more surprising than Seltzer’s deceit is the fact that it was hardly an isolated incident. A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, by Misha Defonseca, is ostensibly the true story of how Defonseca, as a young girl, escaped the Holocaust by trekking across Europe. Misha Defonseca was in fact Monique De Wael, a Catholic who’d spent her girlhood during the war in Belgium. Fragments, by a man calling himself Binjamin Wilkomirski, was another acclaimed Holocaust memoir that turned out to be fake.

Us And Them

LeRoy is clearly an extreme example. But memoir fabrication is nothing new. Indeed, it is a practice older than America. Yet while it’s fair to point out that deceptive memoirists benefit financially from their lies, it’s probably an oversimplification to assume that money is the only relevant motivator. The psychology of those who write up a fake life and those who live a fake life is likely similar. We can assume there is at least some element of duping delight, the pleasure liars feel in fooling their targets. For fake memoirists, this feeling may be compounded by the fact that they fool not only those they know but literally tens of thousands of others. Another factor underlying memoir falsification is that, in many ways, it is easier to pull off than we might think. That’s how I remember it. Even granting the inherent difficulties in disproving the autobiographical assertions of another person, we might hope one of Seltzer’s editors would have caught on to the fact that she had never even been a foster child, let alone one who ran drugs. It’s simple enough to take a critical attitude when browsing the autobiography section of Barnes & Noble. Media deception makes its way into formats that we look to for more than recreational reading.

Some Good Things Never Last

When we pick up a newspaper or a newsmagazine, we assume we are getting the facts about what is happening in the world around us. Unfortunately, several recent incidents have shown that this conjecture might be flawed. During the 1990s, I was a subscriber to the New Republic, a respected weekly magazine of political commentary. I was regularly struck by the articles that appeared near the beginning of the magazine, narrative pieces focused on particular events or trends. 1 comic to a Miata, and Jukt was happy to oblige. Glass had fabricated the entire story. Reporters write about things they have seen or been told. That’s why they’re called reporters. As with a memoirist, ultimately only the journalist really knows what he or she has experienced in investigating a story. Perhaps this is why incidents of journalistic duplicity have become, if not commonplace, than at least less exceptional. The New York Times prides itself on its role as the paper of record, printing corrections to stories sometimes decades after the fact to maintain its reputation for accuracy. Hence the sensation when it was revealed that Jayson Blair, a Times reporter, had fabricated or plagiarized material for dozens of national news stories. He’d offered reporting from places he had never been, he’d given quotes from people he had never interviewed or met, he’d misstated facts, and he’d made up details. In the former cases, the lies are an aberration. The synthetic reality we see on television is not the work of a few duplicitous individuals. Rather, it is the intended product of all involved. Synthetic reality is not the punished exception but the famous rule. Losing trust in the New York Times is quite another.