The Lies of Ryszard Kapuściński
Jack Shafer's contested Slate article questioning the factual reliability of Kapuscinski's reportage, published shortly after the writer's death.
- Author
- Jack Shafer
- Published in
- Slate Magazine
- Date
- 2007-01-25
Author: Jack Shafer
Source: Slate Magazine, January 25, 2007
Link: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2007/01/the-lies-of-ryszard-kapuscinski.html
Editorial summary by kapuscinski.info. The text below is a summary based on the original article. The full article is available free of charge at Slate.
One of the most contested pieces ever written about Kapuscinski — published in Slate literally the day after his death, which by itself provoked sharp reactions among journalists. Shafer, a well-known media critic, states the charge outright: Kapuscinski was a liar.
Shafer draws on John Ryle’s 2001 essay in The New York Review of Books, among the first to question methodically the facts in The Emperor and The Shadow of the Sun. The specific charges: invented dialogue, events that never happened presented as reportage, characters compiled from several people or wholly fictional.
Shafer rejects the appeal to “literary journalism” as a defence of genre. In his account, Kapuscinski allowed his books to be sold for decades as documents of reality rather than as literature, and drew from that a reputation as a trustworthy witness to history. The issue, on this reading, is not the genre but the contract with the reader.
Shafer’s piece is at the same time an attack on the Western literary world, which in his view glorified Kapuscinski uncritically because the writing was beautiful and morally comfortable: anti-colonial, humane, easy to agree with.
Slate published Meghan O’Rourke’s reply five days later.
source: kapuscinski.info