The Fiction of Andrew Vachss

“Investigative journalism is, in my view, all that protects American democracy, and I believe it to be at risk. I speak to audiences all the time, and when you speak to audiences of young people and you say, ‘Name a famous journalist,’ you get Jason Blair, you get Stephen Glass. And when you say to them, ‘For crying out loud, why do you see these people as famous icons?,’ [the answer you get is,] ‘Well, they made movies about them, didn’t they? I mean, they wrote books, didn’t they? They’re actual celebrities, aren’t they?’ If anybody else had so grossly betrayed the credo of their profession, you wouldn’t think they’d be lionized. But journalism? Hey. … So blogging, for example, which, because it’s unregulated, is supposedly the antidote to ‘government–controlled journalism’—and by unregulated, I don’t mean the government’s not involved but [that] there are no standards for it—this one’s fantasy and this one’s truth are indistinguishable by the blind consumer at the other end of the computer.”