In the tab trades, where I worked happily for years, the colors of black and white, and values of right and wrong were clearly drawn; there was a term for a bogus story that all pronounced as a "Hoe Ax". The word of course was hoax, and it would refer to a story that The News printed that was either a fraud or a con artist's handiwork or other misfire of tab journalism that required immediate remedy. The news editor, upon learning that the offending news item had been printed and circulated as part of the regular New York Daily News product, would yell across the city room at the top of his lungs: HOE AX. This public display of mass contrition required that all involved in the news production from that point forward make sure that the correction box admitting the hoax or error be printed in the most appropriate position possible in the next edition so that the loyal readers of The News knew that its editors stood behind their stories, which back in the day many was considered as close to scripture as believers might see outside of Sunday.
I always thought the city room ritual of the Hoe-Ax (a Plains Indian farm tool pictured above) was a bit overdrawn but upon reflection I believe it describes precisely the kind damage that can be done to the trust between reader and writer when a lie is told and how seriously a journalist must be in protecting and/or rebuilding that trust. Because in all communication, there is nothing more important than the bond on trust between the written voice of the writer and the perceiving ear of the reader. Since the days of classic Greek theater, much of our storytelling falls into the fiction (made up events that represent a reality) and non-fiction (truth as told), and blends of comedy and tragedy. 
This has been the accepted narrative structure of storytelling from the get go, but with the advant of new communications technologies, particuarly film and video, a very close story telling version of the truth can be created by actors, film production techniques (camera angles, focus, edits, music, sound, pace). The docu-dramas, instant TV dramataries that use real names and recreate notorious events for fun... this entire new area of entertainment has exploded. Then we had the adoption of these TV narrrative techniques in the news rooms of our broadcast networks. The high culture guru of this news telling technique for broadcast news - Reuven Frank - architect of the anchor careers of Huntley, Brinkley, Chancellor and Brokaw and others, just passed away recently. Frank's original vision and discipline (from the Camel News Caravan through Huntley-Brinkley Report, through The NBC Nightly News) have been overtaken into something that today is unrecognizeable from its original intent. The New York Times, TV Week and the WSJ knew a giant has passed from the media scene. Before Frank, TV drew its news DNA from newspapers radio. According to a note in the Feb 7 WSJ:
Among Mr. Frank's most durable contributions to television news was his emphasis on the nascent medium's basic advantage over radio and newspapers: that it could impart information through a palette of visual techniques. "Pictures are the point of television reporting," he once wrote, as recounted in a profile of him posted on the Web site of the Museum of Broadcast Communications. He is also credited with helping imprint on the DNA of the earliest television journalists, to say nothing of their descendants, the notion that their nonfiction reports must borrow the most time-tested techniques of good narrative storytelling.
What Frank started has become so morphed in the current broadcast and 24-7 cable world, that today's "news" is vitually a new narrative form -- It ain't truth and it ain't fiction. Who are the principles of today's news story - the celebrity achors, the audience or the so-called politician? It's all a muddle. It's TV in what I call: Media-ville. And its pervasive mixing and bluring of the lines between fact and fiction, truth and art, logic vs. assertion, accusation vs. proof, comedy vs. tragedy. vs. irony vs. satire and on and on and setting it all to a malange of image non-sequetors, disconnected video and out of context talking heads has become such a feature of modern communications that an old fashioned hoaxer would tell the world he made up the facts in his non-fiction narrative and believe it was all right! In the lastest case of this sociopathic savant -- James Frey and his bid for the Clifford Irving Award for hoax bestseller, Random House sells millions of Frey's non-fiction stories to an audience hungry for authentic stories of redemption, Oprah gets knocked off her high horse for a spell when her crusading steed stumbles in what anyone with common sense could see was must a modern version of story telling's oldest cons - saying something is so when it ain't. Random House finally pulled the plug today.
As a laborer in the vineyards of the literary form called memoir, I'm sensitive to the nuances of the rules of engagement between the writer and readers of this genre. Much of my literary output in the NewsWalker series featured at columns to the right and left is memoir. As a matter of full disclosure, these memoirs acknowledge from the outset that the words that follow represent the author's (my) best memory of events, and if there are unproven assertions, name changes, or switches in time and sequence, as the writer I know it is my obligation to say so either in the narrative itself or in the title page where all such disclaimers are placed. Which is what I have done. You can't make something up and say it is so when it isn't. And I never did. I never had a problem with these rules of engagement and was simply amazed that so many of our currrent Media-ville elites like Oprah and Random House and all of Frey's addiction recovery enablers were willing to give this hoaxer Frey a pass (at least for a while). Usually the rules for a memoir and for fiction and non-ficton are fairly well understood. The current rules can more than covers any writer's creative muse, and give the writer enough latitude to tell his version of his story and at the same protect the reader from the assumption that everything being read is guaranteed acurate. That Frey was able to ride the current fashions in Media-ville about what goes and what doesn't just reinforces -- to me -- the wisdom of the old tabloid editors who insisted that all errors be called to account publicly, promptly and decisively. It also points how low editing disciplines have fallen in today's Media-ville dominated by the the for-profit corporation communications enterprises. Shame on all associated with the Frey debacle.
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