Now that I’ve retired from The New York Times, I can reveal that one of my favorite lines about the nature of journalism was uttered by Ben Bradlee, the longtime executive editor of The Washington Post and an archnemesis of my former employer.
“We’re not in the truth business,” Bradlee said. “We’re in the facts business.”
While art is a quest for truth, with all the leeway such a search provides, journalism has to describe the world as it is. This is an important function, especially in an era when lies and baseless conspiracy theories fly around the world at the tap of a Send button. But the practice of journalism has its critics, because it’s a business with limitations that are both natural and substantial. Journalism is often shallow — a profession devoted to skimming the surface — and, given the choice, its practitioners will almost always choose sensation and hype over depth and insight.
That being said …. if there is any other profession that can speak truth to power, or hold the powerful accountable, I do not know of it. Thomas Jefferson once said, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.” Jefferson was a deeply problematic guy, but he made an excellent point there.
Folks who exclusively practice either journalism or fiction tend to treat people who engage only in the other with incredulity laced with condescension. Novelists in particular express disdain for journalistic writing, showing little grasp of the realities of a business that has to react in something approaching real time — unlike publishing, where time drags at the pace of the final seconds of a close basketball game. For their part, hardcore journalists tend to look down on fiction writers with a sentiment that can be summarized as: “How hard can it be? They make it all up!”
But using your imagination in a systematic way is hard work. Even the most speculative and fantastical fictional world has to follow an inner logic. And fiction gives writers the opportunity to explore human behavior, and the often maddeningly contradictory ways in which people act, in ways that even the most relentless display of facts will never duplicate.
One final note: As a person who has practiced both journalism and fiction, I’ve always been struck by the reactions of the audience. Anna Quindlen, who has also worked on both sides, once remarked that readers tend to believe that fiction is real, while journalism is made up. It was an astute observation, and it makes me ponder the often-perverse qualities of the human race, but that’s a topic for another blog post.
