The Facts About Fiction

A bunch of us were sitting around Sunday talking about truth and weirdness, of which there’s an abundance this long, hot summer.

The group consisted of four writers, a teacher and a social worker, pretty smart people all of them. What’s more, we were sipping a little wine and, as everyone knows, wine makes smart people even smarter.

The conversation sort of began with Bill Clinton and how weird it was of him walking around the oval office with his fly unzipped, so to speak, and Monica Lewinsky saving the dress with a stain on it.

You’ve got to wonder just what was going through that fuzzy head of his getting it on in the same room where Harry Truman defined character. And you’ve got to wonder what in the hell Monica was going to do with that dress.

I mean, everyone likes souvenirs of their accomplishments, but saving a stain may be carrying a hobby too far.

Then we had Bill on the telly apologizing in that who-me? way he’s got and saying he hadn’t actually lied before, he’d just told a legal truth.

A whaaat?

A legal truth. That’s the same as those people in the Nixon era admitting not that they lied, but that they misspoke, and the Boston Globe’s Patricia Smith creating a kind of cosmic ubertruth to explain her lies.

What an age.

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Clinton aside, all of us sitting around the table Sunday found ourselves dumbfounded by what’s been going on lately in journalism. Forget the tabloids, consider the sins of the, well, Legitimate Media:

June 13--The respected New Republic apologizes for publishing 23 articles by writer Stephen Glass that contained partial or total lies.

June 19--Boston Globe columnist Smith is fired after admitting making up people and quotes in at least four columns “to create the desired impact.”

July 3--CNN and Time retract a story alleging that the U.S. military had used nerve gas on American defectors in Laos, admitting that the story, while not a lie, “cannot be supported.” Sort of an unsupportable truth.

Aug. 20--Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle, already under suspension for stealing jokes, is fired for fabricating an entire column. After a noisy refusal to quit on the first charge, he slinks away in silence on the second.

For fans of lying in the media, there’s also the Washington Post’s Janet Cooke, who in 1981 had to return a Pulitzer after admitting the story that won the prize was a lie . . . a Pulitzer Class Lie.

Why do they do this, everyone around the table wanted to know, and they kind of looked toward me, a journalist for 40 years and a columnist here and in Oakland for about half of that.

I sat up really straight, took a sip of my vintage pinot noir and said very wisely, I thought, “I’ll be damned if I know.”

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There just isn’t any reason I can think of to make up people, situations and quotes in an era when everyone’s jumping up and down to tell their life stories no matter how sordid, sad or self-deprecating.

All you’ve got to do is get off your ass, go out there and look. It’s hard sometimes and it’s tiring. There are days when I’d rather be doing anything but researching a column and then having to write the damned thing.

I’ll delay the inevitable by hammering a nail, patting the dog or just staring into space, but I know that in the long run the name of the game is toil. I owe you out there. You read me. That’s worth the work.

When seeking column material, you don’t go looking for what you intend to find, you go out looking for what’s there, for what’s real, for what matters in the tapestry of today.

I suspect that part of what drove those aforementioned journalists was the quest for recognition contained in prizes. Large newspapers hunger for them, count them, worship them and extol them, creating a climate of blind desperation for those determined to win one.

Cooke got the Big One with a kid on heroin who didn’t exist, and Barnicle was probably going for one with two kids with cancer who didn’t exist, and they made all of us who write for newspapers look like damned fools.

Good manners prevented those at the table from asking, but I’ll tell you: I don’t make up people, I don’t make up situations and I don’t make up quotes. I may be a damned fool, but I’m not a liar. And that’s the truth.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com