Embroidering the Facts

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

A New Yorker writer prompts a storm of criticism

Reporters labor hard to find perfect anecdotes and quotes to drive home the points they want their stories to make. At times they may even be tempted to take a shortcut and sweeten material by merging people into composite characters, placing them in colorful circumstances or concocting pithy remarks. But such fabrications, however faithful they may seem to the spirit of a reporter's observations, are violations of the ethics of the craft. Thus, when New Yorker Writer Alastair Reid, 58, admitted last week that he had indulged repeatedly in such sleight of hand, he prompted a well-deserved storm of criticism, and an apology from the prestigious and generally scrupulous New Yorker. Said the magazine's editor, William Shawn: "He made a journalistic mistake by our own rules. It hurt no one, it was meaningless, it was done for literary reasons."

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 his lapses in the seminar as an example of something that you might do and that I had done--I was certainly not defending it." He did not rule out using the techniques again, but said, "I will take pains, should the issue arise, to make a full disclosure of what I am doing."

Altering facts to achieve a dramatic narrative is a legacy of the New Journalism, which was popularized in magazines and books in the 1960s and '70s and has been increasingly criticized. New Journalists may merge characters or invent scenes. They sometimes reconstruct sequences based on interviews with third parties rather than participants, and even claim to know what people were thinking. Clay Felker, when he was running New York magazine, edited out Gail Sheehy's explanation in an article that a prostitute, Red-pants, was a composite because, he says, "I thought it slowed the story down." He regrets having misled readers. Reviewers challenged the reconstructed dialogue in David McClintick's 1982 Hollywood expose Indecent Exposure, and Don Kowet's A Matter of Honor, an investigation, published this spring, of a CBS documentary about General William Westmoreland. Washington Post Reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein used unnamed sources to reconstruct scenes inside the Nixon White House in The Final Days. For Woodward's Wired, however, about Comedian John Belushi, he named sources section by section.

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; some opinions supposedly voiced by Spaniards were Reid's own musings. Said Reid to the Journal: "Whether the bar existed or not was irrelevant to what I was after. If one wants to write about Spain, the facts won't get you anywhere." He told the Times that he was seeking "a larger reality," and was serving "truth" as he saw it. He said later in the week that one main motive was to protect his sources, but conceded that he could have done so without fabricating scenes.

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, he described his son's 1982 Yale graduation from the purported perspective of "a flinty old friend . . . from the country" attending the graduation of a grandniece. He devised a similar character, and fictitious dialogue, to report a speech at New York University by Nobel-Prizewinning Poet Czeslaw Milosz. Reid's explanation: using a fictional persona helped him overcome writer's block. Personae, such as "our man Stanley," and pseudonyms, such as the railroad buff "E.M. Frimbo," are common devices in "Talk."

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 if you don't have to deal with the facts." To critics, it did not matter that Reid's deviations were mainly inconsequential. Any departure from fact is the first step on a slippery slope toward un-believability. Facts are what people can agree on. Truth can be determined by each reader. --By William A. Henry III. Reported by Marcia Gauger/New York

With reporting by Marcia Gauger/New York