Between fact and fiction: characters compounds and fictional characters or journalism fraud?

Abstract

Placed between Literature and Journalism by amalgamating fact checking to the narrative aesthetics of fiction, Literary Journalism faces the challenge of producing works of ambiguous character. One of the factors in this dispute is the use of composite characters, created by combining biographic features of a number of sources in a single person. In this paper we discuss the borders between fact and fiction in this kind of narrative in two instances. The first is a historical one, with a focus on the profiles about Hugh Griffin Flood by American reporter Joseph Mitchell (1908-1996) published in the New Yorker magazine in the 1940s. The second one puts an emphasis on the separation between real and fake characters, treated as fraud in the press from the 1980s due to cases such as those of The Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke and The New York Times reporter Jason Blair, in 2003.