The Ignorant Investor

In today's edition of the New York times comes this piece in the Week in Review section:

With James Frey's admission last week that he fabricated many of the hardest knocks in his hard-knocks memoir, "A Million Little Pieces" - followed by the news that neither his publisher nor his most prominent cheerleader, Oprah Winfrey, seemed to care - maybe it's time to ask: Does anyone care anymore about the ratio of fact to fiction in the memoir?

If you read the rest of the article, you find that very few people- including the author- see much problem in a fake memoir.

"I think it's partly because over the years the line between fact and fiction has been really blurred in our society," said Mr. Dickstein, the author of "A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World."

"Take the example of advertising or promotion, where people are willing to tolerate listening to politicians making claims, or marketing people making claims, that, if they're not completely false, they're always right at the edge of falsehood. But they tolerate it as part of the overall media buzz of their lives."

One issue the writer doesn't answer is whether the gap between a fake memoir and fake news story like the ones that Jayson Blair wrote in the New York Times a few years back has narrowed. What if Mr. Blair did what he did because he had begun to see that everybody around him was doing similar things: making up quotes, blending characters into composites, describing as eyewitnesses things they had never actually seen? Journalism became tangled with fictional techniques a few decades ago, and the demands of fiction are stringent: you must have compelling and sympathetic characters facing obstacles and overcoming them in a dramatic fashion. But real drama rarely occurs in ordinary life. Makes you wonder whether most of the dramatic angles in the news are mere inventions, doesn't it?

I'd have a little more faith in the media if the reaction from them to Frey's memoir had been to point out that a memoir is not an excuse for outright lies. That there are such things as facts. That if someone's story sounds implausible and the available evidence doesn't back him up, then chances are he's full of shit. That Oprah Winfrey is a stinking whore (almost literally) for continuing to tout a book that's been dishonestly sold. That saying all autobiography is complete and utter bullshit (which is the implication they make by excusing Frey's lies), insults and degrades all those people who can tell their own stories without degenerating into the tactics of the con artist.

These people in the media, they're the ones we depend on for information on the economy, on companies, on all aspects of investing- yet they seem positively blase about Frey. Makes you wonder what kind of liberties with the truth are "traditional" or "expected" in financial journalism. What don't we know about how they do their work?

I imagine them saying, "We're sorry we didn't look into Enron's outrageous claims about its outsized earnings- but you know, financial journalism isn't really about investigating stuff. Everybody does puff pieces on companies...we thought you understood that."

"No," I'd say back. "I didn't know that."