Accurate, but fake

The MSM is apparently trying to use some lies that have recently been revealed to pervert a truth. In an article at American Thinker, Ed Lasky writes about how the New York Times and the LA Times are using two recent memoir scandals -- which involved books that were partially or entire faked -- to attack Eli Wiesel's Night, a holocaust memoir of unimpeachable factual truth. I had a bizarre sense of deja vu reading Mr. Lasky's article, because I'd heard precisely the same type of attack the other day on NPR. There a commentator, his voice dripping with "I like Wiesel" concern, likened Wiesel's book to the recent spate of faked memoirs The commentator pointed out that the Yiddish book that preceded Night had minor differences, such as the final sentence, which adds one more fact to amp up its emotional strength. He ruminated thoughtfully about whether these differences in tone turned the book from an autobiographical book about the camps into a novel. It turns out -- silly me, not to have realized this -- that in the rarified world of NPR, writing differently about the same undisputed facts may also be faking it. This, of course, is entirely separate from "fake but accurate" which allows you to lie 100%, but still be held up as telling the truth. Obviously, truth is a very flexible concept for some. By the way, when I went looking for a link to the above NPR commentary, I also found this link on NPR, which is a news story, not a commentary, advancing precisely the same idea. In other words, the commentary I heard was not an anomaly. Talking to Technorati: Memoirs, Wiesel, Eli Wiesel, Fake memoirs