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About two weeks ago, I wrote in this space – shocked and agog, of course – that New York Times Magazine writer Deborah Solomon was taking great liberties with her weekly question-and-answer column.

According to my piece, Ira Glass of “This American Life” and advice-columnist Amy Dickinson – two well-known media types without an antagonistic bone in either of their bodies – took issue with the fact that Solomon quoted them out of context, massaged their quotes and manufactured a conversation quite different from the one they had.

That piece closed:

Journalism is the rough draft of history, the saying goes. And Carl Bernstein called it "the best obtainable version of the truth." I'm good with either one of those bromides. But when it begins to feel like a writer's workshop where you tinker freely, that's when it stops being journalism and starts to resemble creative writing.

And now today I find myself being called something of a rube by Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle ...

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You ever have a conversation where you thought afterwards, “I wish that had gone a bit better.” Maybe after a date, or a job interview?

According to Matt Elzweig’s new piece for the New York Press, New York Times Magazine writer Deborah Solomon has had that thought. And she decided – on at least two occasions – to change her weekly Q-and-A to be the conversation she wished she’d had.

Most of my interviews with people in Solomon’s column over the years reflected positive overall experiences. (Several of those contacted either declined to comment or didn’t respond to requests for an interview.) But after conversations with two prominent Solomon Q-and-A subjects—Ira Glass, the popular host of Public Radio International’s “This American Life,” and Amy Dickinson, the nationally-syndicated advice columnist who replaced Ann Landers in 2003—the story became more complicated. Both Glass and Dickinson, without any prompting and in significant detail, told me that in the published versions of their interviews, Solomon had made up questions, after the fact, to match answers that, at least in one instance, she had taken out of their original context.

“[Solomon] rewrites her questions and then applies any question to any answer that a person says,” Glass told me in a tape-recorded telephone interview.

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