Fact Checking?

Anyone who was reading the newspapers three years ago will remember the curious case of James Frey, whose memoirs of drug addiction and rehab were powerful enough to draw Oprah’s attention and sell millions of copies before somebody finally got around to checking his background and discovered that Frey was lying through his teeth. The supposedly true story turned out to be more fiction than fact, and the author was eventually berated by Oprah herself (on national television) for his betrayal of millions of readers. No reasonable person blames Oprah for being taken in; any reasonably sane publisher would have fact-checked the book before publishing it – or at least warned the author that if any of these facts weren’t true, SOMEONE would notice, and eventually call him on it…

Unfortunately, there appear to be a great many people out there who don’t really mind being exposed as a fraud so long as they get to keep the money they made while people actually believed their stories. Regular readers of this space will recall posts I’ve written about two Food Network personalities who fall into this category, and a quick check on the Internet will yield literally hundreds of parallel cases, ranging from the relatively harmless (the dozens of “fifth Beatle” pretenders) to the completely horrific (the Madoff case and ongoing outrages), and yet people seem to continue to be willing to trust that someone is telling the truth, simply on the grounds that not doing so would be insane, damaging to their personal credibility, or just not nice…

Another case that has hit the news wires this week parallels the Frey case almost exactly, right down to the appearance on the Oprah show and pending book deal – although this one has some rather more serious overtones. It turns out that a highly anticipated book by a Holocaust Survivor who was helped to survive by a young woman living outside the wire, who many years later met and married her in New York City is a complete fabrication. You can find the Seattle Post-Intelligencer story here if you’d like to; alternately, you can read about the MSU professor who helped to debunk the story here if you like. Now the publisher has cancelled the release of the book (and is seeking to get the author to return the advance he was given), and no one knows exactly how Oprah is going to respond. But the case still does not inspire me to any light-hearted mockery. In fact, it’s making me rather angry…

Now, I realize that it’s highly unlikely that the author meant any harm in this action. Indeed, the stories that have (this time!) been checked out clearly indicate that the couple had been telling this story to everyone they knew for roughly the last 50 years. No one had ever bothered to call them on it, and over the passage of a half-century, they’d more or less forgotten that it was just a touching (or sappy, depending on your point of view) romantic yarn they’d been spinning to explain why their feelings for each other were so powerful, magical, unique, and so on. It’s really quite unfortunate that they decided to enter the tale in a story contest…

So if it was just a harmless yarn that got out of control, why is it irritating me so much, and driving hundreds of Holocaust scholars and Survivors into a relatively genteel fury? Simply put, because it’s cheapening the experience. Because it’s making the death camps seem like quaint, charming places where you might (if you were lucky) encounter a heroic ministering angel who would one day turn out to be the girl of your dreams. Because it’s turning one of the most horrific atrocities in all of human history into nothing more than the setting for a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie special, and giving aid and comfort to Holocaust Deniers, people who make the Nazis themselves look good…

And all because somebody at Penguin Berkley (and, to be fair, in Oprah’s production company) failed to do any fact checking, despite such embarrassing recent examples as Margaret Seltzer, James Frey, Benjamin Wilkomirski or Robert Irvine. Believe me, it’s far from being the worst thing anybody ever did to make a buck, and it hardly compares to the malfeasance of criminals like Madoff. But I can virtually guarantee that there will be many more parallel cases coming until people finally start doing their jobs and checking the facts before they put them on the air…