PressEthic

When do you stop being a journalist?

When you write a memoir, it is considered nonfiction, but by definition it is a story from your point of view. Readers ought to take what is said with the proverbial grain of salt, because memories are imperfect and everyone spins things.

But if you are a journalist writing a memoir, do the expectations change?

After all, if a person spends their career telling people the “objective truth” (whatever that is; I don’t think our class has found it yet), they ought to know better when it comes to their memoirs.

Damian at Daimnation! pulled his quote of the day from Jim Geraghty’s article at National Review Online:

Dear Lord, if I ever botch a story as badly as Mapes did, and, say, write a huge expose on Kim Jong-Il's inappropriate relationship with a goat, and it turns out that the memo describing said relationship was not actually written in North Korean but merely replaced every instance of the letter "l" with the letter "r", please, please, please let me get a $250,000 book deal with an 11-page excerpt in Vanity Fair and a big glossy photo of me with a dog. Thank you.

Damian seems to really enjoy the sarcastic tone of Geraghty’s response to Mary Mapes’s new book, Truth and Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power (to be honest, so do I).

Geraghty goes on to counter many of the points Mapes made in her book.

I haven’t read this book, but if Geraghty is right, then this book is indeed problematic. Mapes, whose biography definitely reads as that of a journalist, ought to be invested in the truth.

Then again, should journalists really be held to a higher standard when it comes to memoirs?

More to the point, is a memoir-writer a journalist? And if not, does a journalist cease to be one when she (or he) writes a memoir?

I don’t know. But I will say this:

If a scientist were to write a memoir of a great discovery, I would expect him (or her) to get the scientific facts right.

Experts should know better, even if they aren’t acting as experts at a given moment.