Trust takes another hit: Is anyone checking the facts?
By MOTOKO RICH AND BRIAN STELTER
THE NEW YORK TIMES
In media circles, there is a joke about facts that are too good to check. This week Oprah Winfrey and the New York publishing industry stumbled on yet another unverified account in the form of a Holocaust survivor who said his future wife had helped him stay alive while he was imprisoned as a child in a Nazi concentration camp by throwing apples over the fence to him.
The story of Herman and Roma Rosenblat, who said they reunited years later on a blind date in New York, turned out to be fabricated, and over the weekend the publisher of his memoir, "Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love That Survived," canceled the February release of the book. This isn't the first time either a publisher or Winfrey has been gullible in the face of an exaggerated tale. Now both Berkley Books, an imprint of Penguin Books, and Winfrey are faces on a media dartboard, with Winfrey dodging criticisms of what the media blog Gawker called her "liar's club."
Read the story.
Something ignored in this cultural phenomenon is something that disturbs me a great deal: the preference of "true" stories over "imaginative" stories. As if Crime and Punishment is less powerful because Dostoevsky never murdered anyone. This is all part of what Norman O. Brown called "Protestant literalism," the west's loss of a sense of magic and appreciation for metaphor. The foundation for all this was set centuries ago, and here we are today, less able than ever to appreciate the difference between "truth" and "fact," so we favor the latter. Our inability to read and see between the lines.
1 comment:
How awful that the Rosenblats lied about their story and that the publishers and movie makers fell for it. Boy in the Striped Pajamas, which was a great book and now movie, never pretended to be true. The Rosenblats, like Madoff, are harming the good Jewish name and it's terrible.
I read a New York Times article about Stan Lee and Neal Adams the comic book artists supporting another TRUE Holocaust love story. There was a beautiful young artist, Dina Gottliebova Babbitt, who painted Snow White and the Seven Dwarves on the children's barracks at Auschwitz to cheer them up. Dina's art became the reason she and her Mother survived Auschwitz.
Painting the mural for the children caused Dina to be taken in front of Dr. Mengele, the Angel of Death. She thought she was going to be gassed, but bravely she stood up to Mengele and he decided to make her his portrait painter, saving herself and her mother from the gas chamber as long as she was doing painting for him.
Dina's story is true because some of the paintings she did for Mengele in Auschwitz survived the war and are at the Auschwitz Birkenau Museum. Also, the story of her painting the mural of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on the children's barrack has been corroborated by many other Auschwitz prisoners, and of course her love and marriage to the animator of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs the Disney movie after the war in Paris is also a fact.
I wish Oprah would do a story about Dina and her art not about the Rosenblats who were pulling the wool over all our eyes.
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