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 book of essays, The Atlantic Ocean, will be out soon in paperback.
Other articles by this contributor:
Everything Must Go! · American Beauties
A Journey in the South · Andrew O’Hagan travels to New Orleans
At the Movies · M. Night Shyamalan
In His Hot Head · Robert Louis Stevenson
The Things We Throw Away · The Garbage of England
How to Survive Your Own Stupidity · Homage to Laurel and Hardy
Hating Football · Andrew O’Hagan deserts the Tartan Army
Seventy Years in a Filthy Trade · Andrew O’Hagan meets E.S. Turner
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