Journalists of the higher kind – of whom there are not so many left – can get very sniffy when the ignorant or obtuse appear to misunderstand the methods of the trade. Thus Neal Ascherson in the Guardian books blog (March 3rd) on a new biography of Ryszard Kapuściński by Artur Domosławski which has just appeared ‑ and virtually sold out ‑ in Poland and which Kapuściński’s widow, Alicja, tried unsuccessfully to have suppressed.
It seems that the great reporter not only had affairs and collaborated with the Polish secret service but made things up. The second and third of these charges have actually been in the public domain for a few years and the first is, arguably, nobody’s business. However, Ascherson feels he must defend Kapuściński against the charge of lying and so he spells out a few facts about journalism as if addressing an audience of slow learners.
“Ryszard Kapuściński kept two notebooks when he was on the road. One was for his job as an agency reporter, haring about the world, meeting deadlines and battling to file stories whose transmission was paid for out of the pittance of worthless communist currency he received from Warsaw. The other was for his calling as a writer, making reflective, creative, often lyrical sense out of what he was experiencing.
“To mix the two notebooks is to miss the point of him. Artur Domosławski’s book, from what is reported about it, suggests that Kapuściński was a dishonest reporter who made up stories about events he hadn’t seen, and invented quotes. This is to confuse his journalism with his books. Almost all journalists, except for a handful of saints, do on occasion sharpen up quotes or slightly shift around times and places to heighten effect. Perhaps they should not, but they – we – do.”
So now we know.
Kapuściński, however, did not, Ascherson suggests, tell any untruths about what he saw in Africa or Latin America in his journalistic despatches to PAP, the state news agency of communist Poland (how can we know this?). But in his books he wrote what is called “literary reportage”, a genre in which you are “meant to believe what you are being told, but not in every literal detail”. Finally Ascherson concedes: “I think that any well-known journalist who does that has a duty to make the distinction clear to the reader, warning her or him that this narrative is not news reporting but one man’s perception of a truth illuminated by imagination. Kapuściński did not make that distinction clear, and I wish that he had.”
“Truth illuminated by imagination” is still a rather generous phrase. There has been scepticism for some time about the reliability of some aspects of Kapuściński’s work, which is without doubt of high literary quality. But that scepticism was not so much in evidence when his books first began to appear in translation and it would seem that what most readers without hesitation then took as fact was in many cases not fact at all. The author did not make the distinction and one wishes that he had.
As for mere journalism, should we be quite so cavalier about practices such as “sharpening up” quotes or shifting around times and places to heighten effect? In among the vast oceans of mendacity and imbecility that characterise contemporary popular journalism there are still small islands where there is an attempt to enforce standards and where readers may reasonably expect that if the newspaper says that something happened it did indeed happen. As the land erodes and the oceans lap ever more threateningly at our feet, surely it is more important than ever that a small number of institutions will continue to enforce the dictum of a famous former editor of the Manchester Guardian, CP Scott: “Comment is free, but facts are sacred.”
Read Neal Ascherson's blog here:
“Artur Domosławski’s book,”Ascherson writes, “from what is reported about it (my emphasis – drb), suggests that Kapuściński was a dishonest reporter ...”. But perhaps “what is reported about it” is misreported. For another account of the book and the purposes of its author
Read Bacacay on Kapuscinski here: