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, will be published in June. Be Near Me, his last novel, has been shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Other articles by this contributor:
Cartwheels over Broken Glass · worshipping Morrissey
Still Reeling from My Loss · Lulu & Co
Seventy Years in a Filthy Trade · Andrew O’Hagan meets E.S. Turner
The Nominee · With the Democrats
The God Squad · Andrew O’Hagan in Bushland
Everything Must Go! · American Beauties
How to Survive Your Own Stupidity · Homage to Laurel and Hardy
Blame it on the boogie · In Pursuit of Michael Jackson
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