Fact, Fiction and Fakery

By Thomas Griffith

Newswatch

For those who wonder what to believe, things get harder all the time. Sociologists insist that newspapers often manufacture "crime waves." Once an unusual holdup catches an editor's eye, every similar crime is. reported as one more chilling example of the same--even though at the end of a year the headlined crime wave didn't make a real blip in police statistics. The murders of black children in Atlanta captured the press's attention because some killings seemed the work of a demonic psycho. The killings were awful; the concern is real, but the news interest has been exploited. Every violent death of a black child in Atlanta--the kind that wouldn't rate a paragraph nationwide had it happened that day in Memphis or Birmingham--is piled on to the city's total (25! 26! 27!) by a press prone to declare and then contribute to "a climate of fear." It may be a kind of retribution that the press now finds itself involved in its own mini-"crime wave"--the faking of stories.

There may not be enough of such faking going on to call it a wave, but it has hurt two of the nation's leading newspapers. When the Washington Post had to return a Pulitzer Prize a month ago, the paper's guiding spirit, Katharine Graham, commented: "I think there is some feeling that this was an egg that would not have been laid in a lot of other places."

One of the editors who thought tighter enforcement of editing standards was "urgently needed" was Michael J. O'Neill of the New York Daily News. O'Neill then had to get rid of one of his flashiest young columnists, Michael Daly. Like Janet Cooke of the Post, with her nonexistent eight-year-old dope addict, Daly lengthily quoted by name an English soldier in Belfast who turned out not to exist. The point should be well made by now: it may sometimes be necessary to use a fictitious name to protect an endangered source, but the source should be real and the right name known to the editor. Editors should be particularly suspicious whenever the quotes by a soldier, or an eight-year-old boy, articulate exactly the point a reporter is trying to make.

Media executives are getting nervous. ABC's New York studio fired five staff members, accusing them of using bogus questions on viewer-participation programs--earlier, an unlikely punishment for such an offense. It is hard enough as it is for a newspaper reader or television watcher to tell fact from fiction. On television, where the ability to create plausible fiction has run low, writers of "docudramas" put words never spoken by Churchill or Truman into their mouths. The confusion is compounded when the public is assured it is getting authentic words mouthed by actors.

NBC devoted a total of three hours of prime time to re-creating the trial of the headmistress who killed the Scarsdale diet doctor. NBC ads proclaimed: THE TRIAL THAT SHOCKED THE NATION! YOU BE THE JURY! Who asked for such a second-guessing of the jury process anyway? Executive Producer Paul L. Klein boiled 10,000 pages of court transcript down to 300, hardly a fair sample. Because he used only the public record, Klein didn't have to pay the headmistress, the lawyers or the judge, or even get their permission. In this way the show was cheaper to make than the usual forgettable made-for-TV movie. But legal doubts begat timidity. Ellen Burstyn played Jean Harris sympathetically, but without her dramatics, so that Television Critic Tom Shales protested that after an hour of it "you begin to long for the hokey melodrama of the traditional movie or TV courtroom scene." Even so, it was hardly what NBC called "what really happened." An English scriptwriter, David Edgar, back in 1974 wrote what he calls the "purest drama-documentary ever written," editing the Watergate tapes into a 45-minute television play. "In fact, of course," he now says, "the play wasn't really pure or objective at all: the whole process of making it had consisted of value judgments, from my judgments about what to put in and leave out, to the director's judgments about what to look at, and the actor's judgments about pace and inflection and gesture and mood."

Klein has already bought the transcript of the Carol Burnett libel case for his next project. But NBC's Harris trial did poorly in the ratings ("So far above reproach that it was a little far above the audience," Klein says). Low ratings may spare the public any more confusion between acting and actuality.

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