Fictional facts are forever counterfeit

From Word & Image; The Facts of Media Life by Max Frankel. Consciously obfuscating fact and ficition is the authorial equivalent of those trying to get something for nothing. Fact and ficition have different values and purposes and trying to pass the one off in the guise of the other is, no matter how artistically motivated, simple fraud.

What's wrong with a little mendacity -- so goes the theory -- to give a tale velocity?

It is unforgivably wrong to give fanciful stories the luster of fact, or to use facts to let fictions parade as truths. The authors of hybrid "factions" and "nonfiction novels" claim poetic license to distort and invent so as to serve a "higher truth" than -- sneer -- "mere journalism." But why then won't they create fictional names and characters and pursue their higher truths in imaginary plots? Why usurp the label of history while rejecting its disciplines?

The answer is that fiction and fact live in radically different emotional worlds and the fabricators greedily want the best of both. Fiction thrills by analogy, by the reader's knowledge that unreal plots can illuminate the deepest truths. Nonfiction excites by experience, by extending a reader's knowledge and understanding of reality. Why should not writers, editors, producers and publishers pretend, like carnival barkers, that fictions are facts? Because a reader who is lured into the House of Facts, poor sap, has paid to experience facts.

[snip]

Facts, unlike literature, do not promise truth. They only record what has been seen and heard somehow, by someone, subject to all the frailties and biases of their observers and interpreters. Yet they must be defended, particularly in a society that values freedom, because by definition, facts can be challenged, tested, cross-examined. Wrong facts and the truths derived from them are always correctable -- with more facts. Fictional facts are forever counterfeit.