{"id":66,"date":"2006-01-20T09:20:00","date_gmt":"2006-01-20T13:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/?p=66"},"modified":"2022-01-02T07:40:09","modified_gmt":"2022-01-02T12:40:09","slug":"teetering-on-the-edge-of-falsehood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/?p=66","title":{"rendered":"Teetering on the Edge of Falsehood"},"content":{"rendered":"

Probably by now most of you have heard about the controversy surrounding James Frey’s number one bestseller, “A Million Little Pieces.”<\/a> It turns out that Mr. Frey’s book, purported to be a memoir detailing his colorful drug and alcohol-addicted past, has been exposed by The Smoking Gun<\/a> as being more fiction than fact.<\/p>\n

Oprah Winfrey<\/a>, who featured the book in her Book Club and conducted an emotional interview with Frey on her show, has come to his defense. Calling in while Frey was being interviewed by Larry King<\/a>, Oprah said fabrications notwithstanding that the story still “resonates” with her and her legions of fans.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, this controversy has set off a firestorm of commentary in the blogosphere and MSM. Both Steve Johnson of the Chicago Tribune<\/a> and Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal<\/a> have written excellent pieces. Here is a sample from Henninger’s article:<\/p>\n

\n

“What’s a fraud now–and what’s something else–has become a question worth considering. We live in a world of reality TV shows, of newspaper photographs and fashion photos routinely “improved” by the computer program Photoshop, of nightly news that pumps more emotion than fact into its version of public events such as Hurricane Katrina, hyper-real TV commercials manipulated with computers, the rise of “interpretive” news, fake singers, fake breasts, fake memoirs. Morris Dickstein of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York described this world as “always at the edge of falsehood” and so people come to tolerate it “as part of the overall media buzz of their lives.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

With this latest example, it does appear to me that we are indeed increasingly teetering on “the edge of falsehood.”\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Probably by now most of you have heard about the controversy surrounding James Frey’s number one bestseller, “A Million Little Pieces.” It turns out that Mr. Frey’s book, purported to be a memoir detailing his colorful…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,24,23,45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-culture","category-current-events","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9124,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions\/9124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}