Some of my favourite writers are unreliable. Ryszard Kapuściński isn’t one of them. Favourite writers, that is, because he was certainly unreliable.

In a touching tribute, Jack Shafer in Slate reminds us that RK wasn’t a real journalist because he made things up. Shafer reheats John Ryle‘s critique of Kapuściński.

This is the thrust of Ryle’s attack:

The force of [RK’s] writing depends to a considerable extent on an air of certainty, on the voice of experience, the authority of someone who, we are told in Shah of Shahs, has survived twenty-seven coups and revolutions, who has driven through burning road-blocks and stayed behind in besieged cities, the only foreign correspondent who remained when the rest of the press-pack left…

I’m not a fan of Kapuściński but some of my favourite writers would probably suffer at the hands of Messrs Shafer and Ryle. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Alistair Cooke, Bruce Chatwin, Primo Levi to name but a few – story-tellers all – vulnerable to the odd fact-checking.

James Fenton, another of them, once wrote that the rules of reporting were invented:

by horrible old men obsessed with the idea of stamping out good writing. And the horrible old men passed on their skills to a series of young men who would never have become horrible without training, and these guys proceeded to attempt to make life as horrible as possible for us. Of the author of any of these American newspaper stylebooks, one could say, as Blake wrote of Reynolds: ‘This man was hired to depress Art.’

So where does journalism lie between art and what philosophers would call ‘correspondence theories of truth?’ Comments sought, but meanwhile here’s Edwin Shuman from Steps Into Journalism, written in 1894:

Truth in essentials, imagination in non-essentials, is considered a legitimate rule of action in every office. The paramount object is to make an interesting story.