Who’s sorry now? 
Andrew O’Hagan
Perhaps we have to thank Watergate, even Deep Throat himself, that sussurating, parking-lot ghoul, for planting us in a world where the shriek of actuality has given way to the soft lilt of fiction. To me there is a stylistic link between that great moment for the Washington Post and the paper’s worst moment, in September 1980, when they ran a report by Janet Cooke that had everyone talking. Cooke wrote a thrilling story about an eight-year-old boy from a low-income neighbourhood of Washington who was addicted to heroin, a story for which she won a Pulitzer Prize. But the New Journalistic ethos was overstrained in Cooke’s case, for her infant addict didn’t exist. The young journalist got caught, the paper was humiliated, but the only element in the tale that was brand new was the level of mea culpa that seemed to invigorate all the participants.
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Andrew O’Hagan’s The Atlantic Ocean, a collection of essays on Britain and America, many of which were first published in the London Review, will be published in June. Be Near Me, his last novel, won the 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize award for fiction.
Other articles by this contributor:
Blame it on the boogie · In Pursuit of Michael Jackson
The Things We Throw Away · The Garbage of England
In His Hot Head · Robert Louis Stevenson
The Nominee · With the Democrats
Cartwheels over Broken Glass · worshipping Morrissey
The God Squad · Andrew O’Hagan in Bushland
Disgrace under Pressure · Andrew O’Hagan reads some lad mags
How to Survive Your Own Stupidity · Homage to Laurel and Hardy
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