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Accuracy: An Impossible Fantasy?

By Matthew Felling

October 17, 2007 / 3:18 PM EDT / CBS News

(AP)

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 (not by name, mind you) by Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle, who wrote:

It seems impossible to me that anyone at the Times, or anyone in journalism anywhere in the country, thought of Solomon's interviews as anything more than an amusing fantasy. They read like Nick and Nora Charles batting the ball back and forth in witty repartee. Of course she rearranged stuff, rewrote stuff, telescoped stuff. Real interviews don't go like that. What she was writing were screenplays.

Let me get one thing off my chest: there are some writers I read and resemble a bobblehead doll while doing so, nodding along the entire time each and every read. Carroll is one of those writers. So it comes as a particular surprise to this writer that he shrugs off Solomon's tactic so completely as to condescend to those who disagree.

I know there is a line between rigidity and fantasy when it comes to reporting. I'm well aware that you have to cut some slack sometimes. I've discussed and explained away "quote-cleansing" in this space and I recently defended the potentially-fictitious potentially-fictitious nature of advice columns last Friday. But when it comes to a question and answer column in the newspaper of record – one that resembles an exact transcript, rather than prose – I'm going to side with a greater focus on accuracy.

This isn't performance art or improv. This is journalism.