Fake but accurate journalism

John Leo looks at the whole mindset that thinks there is no such thing as an objective reality and thus stories from the Duke Lacrosse case, the New Republic's Baghdad Diarist, Rigoberta Menghu, Cindy Sheehan, to Tawawna Brawley. It's a damning list of stories that, even after shown to be wrong, supporters still were happy to see what they regarded as some deeper truth exposed even if the facts were all wrong.

Reluctance to change a popular story line helps account for the strange press coverage of Cindy Sheehan. That line pitted moral mom versus stone-hearted president. When Ms. Sheehan's outbursts grew stranger, the press stayed with the soft line about a mother's grief and simply omitted her increasingly bizarre comments that American troops were "being sent to kill innocent people" in Iraq and that President Bush was "a filth spewer" and "an evil maniac" guilty of "blatant genocide."

The insurgents who killed her son Casey, on the other hand, were "freedom fighters." Few of these little verbal grenades made it into the mainstream press. Sometimes a narrative line is so powerful it can resist even a massive array of facts. When Rigoberta Menchu's account of class and ethnic warfare in Guatemala was revealed to be largely false, many professors and critics said this didn't matter much because her book contained emotional truth. If it's good for the Left and since it won her a Nobel Prize, who cares if she made it up?

Ms. Menchu's black-and-white depiction of villainous landowners and virtuous oppressed peasants was too simple — the landowners often cooperated with the peasants. The great land struggle she described between her father and the wealthy landowners was actually between her father and his in-laws. Her allegedly poor and oppressed father had title to 6,800 acres of land. Liberal sociologist David Stoll interviewed 120 people in Ms. Menchu's hometown and revealed an astonishing amount of mendacity. But her book "I Rigoberta Menchu" is still revered and studied on campuses across the country. The narrative line is useful.

After the Tawana Brawley hoax was exposed, the Nation magazine ran an article saying that "in cultural perspective, if not in fact, it doesn't matter whether the crime occurred or not," since the pattern of whites abusing blacks is true. Whatever.

We need to demand more of journalists than some sort of postmodern approach to reporting the news.