The Daisey story continues to unfold, with Michael Wolff at the Guardian coming to Daisey’s defense on this basis: that Daisey writes well, and most journalists do not. More to the point – that Daisey makes his meaning felt with the audience, causing them to see the world in a new way; and most journalism uses “having the correct facts” as an cop-out for compelling prose.

It would be easy to dismiss Wolff’s argument as a variation on Daisey’s “different kind of truth” theme, but after reading, it strikes me as more nuanced than that and deserving of a fuller response.

Wolff’s contention has this going for it – most journalists probably are bad writers. Daisey is certainly a good one. All the facts in the world are useless if they don’t move people to act on them in a manner befitting their seriousness. If it were otherwise, we’d all talk to each other in pure mathematics, and there would be no pain in the world (possibly no pleasure, either).

Similarly, the standards for what does and does not constitute honesty in journalism is a *somewhat* blurred line. Gay Talese, for instance, didn’t strive for word-for-word accuracy with quotes. (To go even further back, G.K. Chesterton, that neglected giant – physically and figuratively – was famous for misquoting from memory; though in his day it amounted to a mere foible. It is hard to say how Chesterton would fare in the postmodern world.)

But I have to disagree with Wolff’s argument on just how blurry the line really is, and on how much the facts – the actual, factual facts – matter. For Wolff it seems to come down to an either/or proposition. Either you can have your precious facts served up lukewarm in a nice dull broth of swampwater prose (and hope you choke on it!), or you can feast on the rich banquet of well-written Greater Truths on offer from Mike Daisey, Truman Capote, and all the other fabulous misunderstood literati.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Or, to put it another way, it will always be that way.

Truly talented and hard-working journalists can, and do, present honest-to-God-this-really-happened facts in compelling and limpid prose. Likewise, talented and hard-working fabulists can, and do, use imagined or recreated people and events to make us confront and grapple with serious issues in the real world. (At this point let me give a brief shout-out to musicians, comedians, actors, and entertainers, who provide legitimately good things that fall outside of the purview of the current argument.)

Likewise, as no less an authority on lying in journalism than Jayson Blair has pointed out, we will always have liars with us in journalism. As I pointed out in my previous post, dramatists don’t get a pass when they lie about having their facts right in a context in which that’s expected of any human being.

And we will always have lousy writers with us – just as we will always have lousy poets, actors, electricians, doctors, lawyers, etc etc. Mediocrity is a fact of life. That’s why we value talent in the first place.

Wolff ends on this note:

Journalism today speaks to no one as passionately as it speaks to other journalists. Fewer and fewer people believe it, feel informed or entertained by it, or find themselves compelled to seek it out. The journalism priests would say that one reason for our ever-shrinking following is because sinners in the profession have undermined our credibility.

I would say it is because journalism – calling it so is a recent and self-serving bit of professional elevation – is not our real job; writing is. And it is not Mike Daisey’s factual lapses that we should be so focused on, but, rather, how he writes so well.

I would reply that maybe he has a point in his first paragraph; less of one, but still a point in the second. But in his own piece of self-serving rhetoric, Wolff draws a sharp either/or distinction between writing well and getting the facts right. If having the facts doesn’t excuse shoddy writing (and I agree that it shouldn’t), then neither does beautiful writing, in a context where the facts are expected to be right, excuse getting them wrong.

I consider myself a writer. When I write what constitutes journalism, I consider myself a writer who’d better have his facts straight. There’s no reason I can’t strive to do both, even if the next guy doesn’t know his ass from his elbow and couldn’t write well about it even if he did.