Jon Margolis, former chief political reporter for the Chicago Tribune and the author of "The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964," lives in northeastern Vermont, where he writes and teaches. 

Back in 1998, Patricia Smith, then and now a prize-winning poet, was fired by (technically asked to resign from) the Boston Globe because she had been making stuff up. Stuff like the names of people and their addresses and words from their mouths, all of which went directly from her imagination into her columns.
In the spirit of charity, it is possible that Smith was not unethical as much as she was confused. She’s a creative artist. That’s what creative artists do. They make stuff up. She may not have realized that even creative artists aren’t supposed to make stuff up for newspaper columns.
That’s because journalists don’t make stuff up. At least they aren’t supposed to. There are a few respectable exceptions. The late Mike Royko’s readers knew there was no Slats Grobnik, just as Jimmy Breslin’s understand that Marvin the Torch is, well.. made up stuff.
 
But in neither case was there any intent to deceive. These were columnists being short-story writers, or, perhaps more accurately, vignettists (a word herewith coined) for the day. By and large, though, those of us who do news, including news commentary, do not make stuff up. We find stuff out. Then we put what we found out—and no more—in print, on the air, or, these days, into the blogosphere.
 
Of late, though, the techniques of fiction have been infiltrating journalism in a subtler, more intriguing, and perhaps eventually more dangerous manner. Here the problem is not ethical, but intellectual—the increasing inclination of reporters and columnists to put into print and on the air stuff that they don’t—that they can’t—know for certain is true.
 
No, they aren’t making stuff up. Instead, they are surmising, inferring, deducing. In many cases, their inferences make sense. No doubt some of them are correct. But they can’t know they are correct. They are not writing fiction. But they are using the techniques of fiction where those techniques do not belong.
 
Exhibit A these days is the (over?)-coverage of Professor Henry Louis Gate’s arrest by Cambridge, Massachusetts, Police Sgt. James Crowley. In fairness, the participants did a great deal of surmising themselves, perhaps setting the tone.
 
Thus Professor Gates, in an interview with the web site, The Root, said that Sgt, Crowley “had a narrative in his head: A black man was inside someone’s house, probably a white person’s house, and this black man had broken and entered, and this black man was me.”
 
As if anyone knows what narrative another person has in his head. Anyone but a novelist, but the novelist is creating the narrative as she is creating the character. Sgt. Crowley is not a fictional character, but an actual fellow, and the only authority for whatever narratives his head may hold.
 
Gates is outside our jurisdiction here. Judith Warner is not. In her July 26 New York Times column, Warner quotes Gates’s denial that he had said anything about Crowley’s mother, and Gates’s suggestion that the Cambridge cops had stolen the idea from a long-gone situation comedy.
 
 “I think there’s more to it than that,” Warner wrote. “I think it’s very likely that Crowley really does believe he heard the insult to his mother. And that’s because Gates wasn’t the only one in that house, on that day, whose thoughts were traveling well-worn grooves chiseled by race. Both men were, consciously or not, following scripts in their heads, stories of vulnerability and grievance much more meaningful than their actual exchange.”
         
OK, it’s a column, in which Warner gets to express her opinion, and the “I think it’s very likely…” arguably justifies her opinion about what “Crowley really does believe he heard.”
         
But “scripts in their heads”? The only script here is the one being concocted by Warner, who is—there is no other term for it—writing fiction. An honorable enterprise, the writing of fiction, in all sorts of venues. A newspaper column is not among them.
         
Even less is a newspaper story. But in a July 29 Washington Post story about U.S. China negotiations, reporters Annys Shin and Mary Beth Sheridan tell us that, “the Chinese, along with many other investors, fear that massive U.S. spending, as well as the Fed's injection of hundreds of billions of dollars into the financial system, may cause inflation to flare, reducing the value of their U.S. investments.”
         
Could be. Could even be that Shin and Sheridan know this.
 
No, let’s re-think that one. All they could know is that one or more Chinese officials told them that they fear inflation will “flare” in the U.S. But there is no hint in the story that any Chinese official said any such thing. If none did, these reporters are also in the fiction business
 
Some press critics get too finicky about this kind of thing. The Post employs honest and capable reporters. We don’t need an exact quote, nor the name of the official who provided the information. But some version of attribution would help assure the reader that the reporters were not simply…making stuff up.
 
What we have here though is not just a lack of reportorial prudence; we also have a lack of reportorial skepticism. Chinese officials are going to tell American reporters (assuming here that some Chinese official so told these American reporters) what they want the reporters (and therefore the rest of us) to believe. The record of government officials –Chinese, American, or Tanzanian—playing it straight in these matters is, shall we say, spotty. A little incredulity might be in order.
 
Especially when, on the face of it, this particular assertion seems a bit far-fetched. Prices in this country are still going down. So are wages. Unemployment is going up, which means wages will continue to go down, or at least not to go up. Yes, without some intelligent (but not all that complicated) policy changes 12, 15, or 20 months hence, inflation could become a problem. Now, deflation seems the greater danger. At the very least, reporters should be aware that all this inflation-scare talk might be at least as much a political ploy as a reasonable concern.
 
In general, writing fiction is harder than what many a novelist scorns as “mere” journalism.” One reason reporters don’t make stuff up is that we’re no good at it. If we were, we’d write novels and get rich, or at least get lionized by the chi-chi set, the folks who say “mere” journalism. In some ways, though, it requires less effort (if also less talent) to surmise, infer deduce, and then put it in print or on the air, than to find out what is actually happening and to place what is happening in context.
 
Without asking a person (and sometimes not even then) a journalist can not know his or her motives or intentions. Putting those motives and/or intentions in print or on the air without asking the person is, then, writing fiction, a noble enterprise that should be left to the novelists.
 

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