Last night some friends had a dinner party and they told the table about a hellish flight they had been on. Heathrow to Newark, but the flight stopped at Shannon because the bathrooms weren’t working, and they spent 24 hours in Shannon, then after another few hours on the tarmac, airborne, the stewardes–sorry, flight attendants–announced that the bathrooms still weren’t working, and if you really had to use one, could you not flush? Etc. There was nearly an uprising among passengers beginning to sense they had rights. My friends scored 4 $600 vouchers off the airline as compensation.
I bring this up because the story got into the papers, my friends said, and the story was all wrong. It had the bad guys being the flight attendants, when in fact the flight attendants had been great, funny, apologetic. And other facts–flat wrong.
We talked it over and agreed that journalists
almost always get things second-hand and people lie or embellish, or the police have already gotten it second hand so it’s a game of telephone.
That’s what happened with the flight from hell, someone lied about it. Ben Bradlee always used to
say this: We print lies because people tell us lies.
When I was driving home I thought about when I first got into daily journalism, and my girlfriend’s father, a scientist, said that he had once witnessed a fire in his hometown of Toronto and the next day he saw an article about the fire in the paper and everything was wrong. Every fact was wrong, he stated flatly. His denunciation still feels like an illumination, 30 years on. I suppose it’s why I like the blogosphere. You never know if it’s right and you can’t just be a passive reader. And why the best representations of reality are in fiction.
