Multiple choice

Daily Post newspaper reporter Roger Nightingale let it be known that Andrea Johnson, the key figure in his award-winning series of articles on prostitution and drug abuse, was a composite of many persons and not a single, real person, and so he was the subject of much criticism by fellow journalists for having failed to disclose that information when the articles were first published. But these were the same critics who voted Nightingale a prize for his magazine serial General, which was a much dramatized and fictionalized account of a Korean War military leader whose character was obviously patterned closely after that of Douglas MacArthur. In which of the following ways might the critics mentioned in the paragraph argue that they were NOT inconsistent in their treatment of Nightingale's works?

I. Fictionalization is an accepted journalistic technique for reporting on sensitive subject matter such as prostitution.

II. Critic disapproval is one of the most important ways members of the writing community have for ensuring that reporting is accurate and to the point. III. There is a critical difference between dramatizing events in a piece of fiction and presenting distortions of the truth as actual fact.

  1. I only

  2. I and II only

  3. II and III only

  4. III only

Reveal answer Fill a bubble to check yourself
D Correct answer
Explanation

(4) The insight required to solve this problem is that the apparent contradiction can be resolved by observing that the two cases are essentially different. The one is supposed to be a factual story; the other is a fictional account. Only III properly expresses this distinction, and II is simply irrelevant. While it may be true that disapproval is one way of trying to keep members of the profession honest, that has nothing to do with the seeming contradiction in the behavior of the critics. Finally, (I) contradicts the explicit wording of the passage, which stated that the critics rejected the fictionalization