A plausible but imagined memory that fills in gaps in what is remembered.
What interested me most about the Jayson Blair/New York Times scandal was the silence of the individuals mis-quoted and mis-represented by Blair.
When the Times went to somewhat extraordinary lengths to set the record straight by re-interviewing scores of Blair’s "sources" it was found that many of them saw their names in the papers, and saw the preposterous statements attributed to them, but did nothing to correct the matter. Why is this? Is it because they felt powerless, or because they did not care? Some seem to have simply accepted that they might have said these things, a phenomenon of conflated realities that I think partly defines journalism.
Blair described the West Virginia home of Jessica Lynch, but the house he described no resemblance to the real Lynch home. The Lynch family did not contact the Times with any concern about the matter, in fact they seem to have laughed it off and turned it into a running family joke.
As I read through the Times‘ efforts to set the record straight I sensed, in mostly small ways, the reputations of individuals and organizations being sullied and exploited, and I find it hard to imagine that this is uncommon in modern journalism. So many times I’ve read stories in which an anonymous source delivers a quote of such pinpoint precision, a comment that crystallizes the direction of the story so perfectly that I assume this source was either coached into saying these things or else fabricated outright.
I think confabulations and conflations of reality are a staple of American culture, by no means limited to journalism. How often do we sit through litanies of friends and acquaintances sharing "their side of the story" regarding a failed romance or getting fired from a job, silently questioning the emphases and omissions but settling for a friend’s version of events and knowingly passing it along to others.
