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by cratermoon 434 days ago
The funny thing is, Daisey was not the first time narrative journalism – aka documentary media – has waltzed down the path to fiction. Famously, we have the film Nanook of the North and the book Wisconsin Death Trip, case studies I covered when I was in journalism program, before TAL. Today, we might call these works docudrama, but the blurring of the line between drama and journalism remains.
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There was also that Der Spiegel journalist that wrote effectively a completely made up fiction about an American town called "Fergus Falls. The followup investigation of which discovered a number of additional stories that ranged from highly exaggerated to completely made up.

The danger of trying to tell a narrative with journalism is the tendency to decide on the narrative you want to tell, and gather facts (or I guess make them up) to fit that narrative, rather than finding a narrative in the fact that lets you tell their story.