Word: reid
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...Reid's manipulations of details were recounted in the Wall Street Journal. Reporter Joanne Lipman was a student at Yale in 1983 when Reid spoke at a seminar on literary law and ethics. In subsequent interviews with Lipman and then with a New York Times reporter, Reid appeared to endorse romanticizing the setting of a story and even the creation of composite characters and dialogue. Last week, however, Reid told TIME that he had long regarded his inventions as "an error, without qualification," and said, "I have not made a career of such practices." He explained that he disclosed...
...Reid, a New Yorker writer since 1959, acknowledged five instances, and said there may have been others, in which he modified facts. By far the most troubling episode was a December 1961 "Letter from Barcelona" in which Reid described Spaniards sitting in "a small, flyblown bar," jeering openly at a televised speech by the then Dictator Francisco Franco. In fact, the bar as described no longer existed at the time of the broadcast, and Reid watched Franco's address in the home of the establishment's onetime bartender. Two of the main characters in the article were composites...
...Reid's other admitted lapses were less sweeping. In a 1976 report on the decline of a Spanish village, he "removed the specifics" from a description of the place to preserve its privacy; Shawn says the village was recognizable as "a composite." In a 1982 account from Spain, Reid attributed a conversation with an unnamed cab driver to a particular trip, although he concedes that he does not know exactly when it occurred because his notes "have no dates on them." For the magazine's "The Talk of the Town," a compendium of short, quasi-editorial reports...
Journalists generally hold that compressing a person's remarks or improving his grammar is acceptable if it does not distort meaning. But Editor William Thomas of the Los Angeles Times said that he would dismiss a reporter for behavior like Reid's: "It is an indulgence we cannot afford in this business." Leonard Downie, who was named last week as managing editor of the Washington Post, said, "Shawn is apparently torn between personal loyalty to Reid and the standards for accuracy of his magazine." Declared Des Moines Register President Michael Gartner: "Anybody can be a good writer...
When journalists hear journalists claim a "larger truth," they really ought to go for their pistols. The New Yorker's Alastair Reid said the holy words last week: "A reporter might take liberties with the factual circumstances to make the larger truth clear." O large, large truth. Apparently Mr. Reid believes that imposing a truth is the same as arriving at one. Illogically, he also seems to think that truths may be disclosed through lies. But his error is more fundamental still in assuming that large truth is the province of journalism in the first place. The business...