Speaking Lies to Power

In a world where spin-doctors and professional propagandists have nurtured fabulation into profitable industry, where outright deceptions masquerade as another point of view, is it ever okay for a journalist to lie?

Harper’s investigative reporter Ken Silverstein answers that question with a resounding “it depends.”

Silverstein’s 2007 undercover exposé of lobbying for foreign dictators—"Their Men in Washington: Undercover with D.C.’s Lobbyists for Hire"—ignited a particularly turbulent storm of criticism. For the piece, Silverstein took on a false name and assumed the helm of a fake consortium of investors serving as an intermediary for the authoritarian government of Turkmenistan. The article chronicles the shocking promises made by the toniest of Washington lobbying firms as they fell all over themselves to propose a full frontal PR offensive—including placing friendly op-eds in ostensibly unsuspecting newspapers—and offer access to the highest echelons of government.

But for many in the media establishment, Silverstein’s methods were the outrage. The most high-profile criticism came from Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz. Kurtz, a long-time arbiter of journalistic manners, raps Silverstein, saying, “no matter how good the story, lying to get it raises as many questions about journalists as their subjects.”

But Silverstein and the criticism he engendered also raise provocative questions about the literary quality of lying in nonfiction: how do ethics bear on aesthetics, and to whom must a writer be truthful? Silverstein’s undercover methods not only enabled him to access a story that would otherwise be off limits but also provided material for a textured narrative that brought run-of-the-mill Washington depravity to light in a way that forcefully engages the reader. This appeal, of course, is related to the shockingly ho-hum workaday banality of the corruption Silverstein exposes. But it also has to do with the literary potential of going undercover—in both nonfiction and make-believe alike.

The work of nonfiction authors like Gay Talese was part of what many heralded as The New Journalism, in large part due to its resemblance to a narrative form long associated with fiction. “I believe that if you go deep enough into characters they become so real that their stories feel like make-believe,” says Talese. “They feel like fiction. I want to evoke the fictional current that flows beneath the stream of reality.”

Talese, interestingly, is not a big fan of notebooks or tape recorders.

America is obsessed with all that is conspicuously real, marketed as the unadulterated truth. Americans have long been urged to “get real,” and, perhaps taking the hint, have eagerly taken up reality television, Facebook updates and amateur pornography. The idea is that if a camera hangs around enough, people will revert to “normal” or “natural” unconscious—and therefore true—behavior. But in reality television as in so many other things, characters often end up the worn-down dupes of a higher power’s script. A compelling nonfiction author captures the really real, in scenes that are more reminiscent of fiction. Deception often plays a role in such nonfiction, from Ted Conover’s lies of omission used to get work as a prison guard for New Jack City to the total fabulations of erstwhile magazine writer Stephen Glass.

Calvin Trillin bristles at the New Journalist label, saying the term refers to “someone who feels he doesn’t have to tell the truth, or as someone who believes he can get inside people’s heads and know their thoughts.” Trillin’s disquiet, however, concerns instances where the writer lies to the reader, not where the writer lies to a story’s subject. What of Silverstein, who is, without betraying the reader, playing a fictional character in his own nonfiction story? A lying character often contributes the theatrical elements that make nonfiction compelling, whether it be a book on secret societies, the Mafia, true crime, espionage or political corruption.

And lying, of course, has long been part and parcel of official politics. With the rise of the neo-conservatives under Bush, however, old-school malfeasance was dressed up with the philosophical justification of the “noble lie.” Developed by Plato and rearticulated by the late University of Chicago philosopher Leo Strauss, neoconservatives believed that it was prudent to offer different measures of “truth” to different classes of people. While there is much debate over what exactly Strauss intended politically, it is clear what many neo-cons gleaned from his thinking.

In a 2004 Harper’s article Earl Shorris argued that, “For Strauss, as for Plato,”—and, I might add, for Harper’s as well—“the virtue of the lie depends on who is doing the lying.” Though it seems equally important who is being lied to. Silverstein, like the neo-cons, implies that a writer has different truth-telling responsibilities to different people. Following Silverstein’s argument, however, these lies are different in kind. The “noble lie” is meant to conceal truth, whereas Silverstein’s lie aims to reveal and uncover—in the service of the reader.

Both the neocons and Silverstein make people uncomfortable. While lies can do many things and the stakes are often different, we pose similar questions as we anguish over the sincerity of a memoir or the tactics of Borat. But is Kurtz right to impose this moral certitude on investigative journalism?

In his introduction to a collection of Harper’s essays called Submersion Journalism, then-editor Roger Hodge notes that a “paradox of political reporting today is that ‘access’ as often as not yields less than nothing...Voters do not need more sanctioned profiles, meticulously stripped of substance.” The way Hodge sees it, Kurtz and company are representatives of a type of media that is embedded amongst the powerful from Iraq to Washington—and thus lack critical distance. But Harper’s editors know that undercover reporting is more than a necessary watchdog—it’s also a captivating read.

In an interview with NPR, Kurtz said that given the media’s credibility deficit, going undercover is “in modern journalism...a luxury we can no longer afford.” But in staking out his defense of journalistic integrity, Kurtz forgets that the reader is primarily concerned with whether or not the author is honest with her—Washington lobbyists be damned.