Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...while the discovery of fiction in several national publications is pretty unusual, we should not look at those disparate troubles as the symptoms of a more widespread disease in today's newsrooms--a few bad apples don't necessarily tell us much about the rest of the bunch. The real scandal, at least as far as journalism is concerned, was the very thing that kept those troubles in several newspapers and magazines from attracting more attention: the press's painful over-coverage of the great presidential pitfall. And that over-coverage was made possible by a substantial threat to journalism...
...larger problem in journalism. For conservative media critics, the answer is (surprise, surprise) the shortcomings of the liberal media: "Because of their institutional liberalism," Joseph Perkins writes of The New Republic and The Boston Globe, "it didn't occur to them...that their talented young liberal writers were producing fiction." Never mind the fact that Glass was more libertarian than liberal and that his fabrications targeted politicos of all stripes--even Perkins wouldn't want facts to get in the way of his preconceptions...
Pundits may try to weave Glass, Smith, Arnett and Barnicle into a nice, tight problem in today's media, but in truth, the summer's most critical journalistic scandal has little to do with fabricated articles, however egregious those fabrications were. The real forces that push journalism toward fiction are the changes in the way that people get their news. With the rise of Internet and 24-hour news channels, the news cycle has irreversibly changed, putting a high premium on a network or newspaper's turnaround time--the idea is to get out a report or a commentary...
...despite the potential dangers, one can approach and enter the holy sites like the Western Wall and the Dome of the Rock almost 24 hours a day, through metal detectors and under the gaze of sharpshooters. At first it is a bit shocking, to one used to the American fiction of invisible security...
...repeated infidelity, the mixture of presidential power and prestige with personal failure, the blurring of the line between fiction and reality--it is all almost too much for us to absorb, and so we hope it will go away...