Who’s sorry now?

Andrew O’Hagan

  • True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa by Michael Finkel
    Chatto, 312 pp, £15.99, May 2005, ISBN 0 7011 7688 1
  • Burning Down My Master’s House by Jayson Blair
    New Millennium, 288 pp, US $24.95, March 2004, ISBN 1 932407 26 X
  • The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm
    Granta, 163 pp, £8.99, January 2004, ISBN 1 86207 637 5

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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Vol. 27 No. 11 · 2 June 2005 » Andrew O’Hagan » Who’s sorry now? (print version)
Pages 10-12 | 3912 words