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外刊读写营第8期 公众号/B站：三言两语杂货社 Unit 1
Journalism’s What If Problem
Too many reporters are writing fiction.
When I was growing up in New York in the 1970s, the city was at its nadir—
bankruptcy, burned-out buildings, rampant crime. I started in public school, then
switched to private in the fifth grade. My parents made the change because they
said that if I went to the local middle school, I would be “knifed in the halls.” This
was an act of fiction.
I say it was an act of fiction not because getting knifed was an impossibility, but
because it was speculative, one of many potential futures. In my house, the fear of
that potential future was strong enough for my dad to take on extra work and make
the change.
As a novelist and filmmaker, I spend a lot of time thinking about the value of fiction. I
tell stories to help me understand my world and the people in it. My job is to create
feelings in the audience—fear and longing, joy and anger. When I consider the
author’s role in our culture, I picture the following sequence: first comes news,
then comes history, then comes fiction. But over the past 10 years, I’ve noticed
something at first puzzling, then alarming. Fact and fiction are trading places in
the sequence.
I first saw evidence of this phenomenon during coverage of the 2016 Republican
National Convention. Halfway through the week, a CNN anchor noted in an interview
with Newt Gingrich, the Republican politician, that violent crime was down across
the country. But Gingrich argued that this was just one “view” and that people “feel
more threatened.” The CNN anchor insisted, “Feel it, yes. They feel it, but the facts
don’t support it.” Without missing a beat, Gingrich said, “As a political candidate,
I’ll go with how people feel, and I’ll let you go with the theoreticians.”
This was an early sign that we were moving from a fact-based world to a fictional
one, where how people feel about crime is as real as the crime itself. Feelings are外刊读写营第8期 公众号/B站：三言两语杂货社 Unit 1
meant to be the purview of fiction writers. We construct our stories around the
feelings of our characters. How they feel drives their actions. However, feelings are
not, traditionally, how we as humans understand reality and how we filter events
into first news and then history.
Another sign of this shift came with the rapid proliferation of alternative narratives.
In the past, when news happened, the media would report the facts. Only later
would conspiracy theories emerge. Then came January 6, an event that unfolded
as fact and fiction simultaneously. While the mainstream media showed us footage
of Donald Trump supporters storming the Capitol in real time, Fox News, other
right-wing outlets, and social media told people that the riot they were watching
was actually the work of antifa. And so, before our eyes, the fictional version of the
moment was born at the same instant as the reality.
Speculation is not the function of journalism. It is what an anxious brain does,
worrying about all the ways things could go wrong, sending the worrier into a
panicked and angry state—the same state of mind that consumes Fox News viewers.
In the past 20 years, Fox has made billions off its viewers’ anxiety, the fear its hosts
inspire motivating those viewers to watch more and more Fox in a cause-and-effect
spiral. In the online age, this is known as doomscrolling.
You can argue that there’s no equivalency—that replacing fact with fiction in the
present is dangerous, while painting pictures of potential disasters is simply being
prepared. My point, though, is not that news organizations are inventing the threat
to democracy. My point is that when they fill their feeds with what ifs, they degrade
the exercise of journalism, turning news into gossip and journalists into pundits.
This is not a new phenomenon. Twenty-four-hour cable-news networks and talk
radio were the original alarmists, but in a country where the news media are
polarized between “our” sources and “their” sources, we should consider the idea
that how journalists report the news may be as important as the news itself. The
mainstream media may be trapped in an emotional call-and-response with the
audience that escalates fear and anger at the expense of our shared reality.外刊读写营第8期 公众号/B站：三言两语杂货社 Unit 1
There is a larger story here about how algorithms push content with high emotional
impact into our feeds, and how clicks and likes drive advertising dollars. That is, a
story about how news is a for-profit business. But to the degree that this is a story
about how news organizations approach the job of informing Americans about the
events and personalities of the day, I’m going to keep it simple and say that by using
the tools of fiction to stir feelings of fear and anger, news platforms undermine the
real value of their news and impair people’s ability to consider it clearly.
One day in the not-too-distant future, history books will be written about what
actually happened in the second Trump term. Then the fiction writers will descend,
looking for meaning, having meditated on the realities we’ve experienced, the
truths we’ve uncovered. And if it turns out we were all knifed in the halls, we will
write about that as well. But until then, I think we are all best served by focusing
on what is happening, not what might.
