Nothing But the Truth?
But Smith apparently doesn't think of it as lying. She wrote: "I will survive this knowing that the heart of my columns was honest and heartfelt." This is a somewhat ambiguous sentence, but it seems to be a claim that emotional truth (the stuff of fiction) justifies or excuses fictional techniques in a column. One media critic, Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, read Smith's statement that way. "You get the sense reading her apology that she has the mentality of an artist who's talking about the truth with a capital T," he said. "But journalism is fundamentally about nonfiction."
What makes this interesting is that so much journalism today has turned away from the old ideal of objectivity. Many reporters accept the currently fashionable postmodern theory that objective knowledge of any sort is a myth. (A couple of years ago, I gave a speech at a convention of young journalists, and when I talked about the ideal of objectivity a mildly exasperated rumble of dissent swept through the room.)
The postmodernists put quotation marks around words like reality and push their disciples to embrace the principle of subjectivity. One of the teachings is that there is no fixed history--history is created in the minds of historians. It is what historians choose to make of the past. Journalism often seems to come under this heading, too. Since objectivity has been declared a myth, journalism is inherently a subjective exercise in which the feelings and will of the journalist function to create the truth of what has just occurred.
"Throughout our culture," the critic Michiko Kakutani writes, "the old notions of 'truth' and 'knowledge' are in danger of being replaced by the new ones of 'opinion,' 'perception,' and 'credibility.' " At the least, we are living in a docudrama culture in which the techniques of fiction and nonfiction are beginning to blur. That's why Patricia Smith's defense of her emotional honesty is more alarming than the straightforward faking of Stephen Glass.
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