Media-crity

A few people have forwarded me articles about Oprah confronting James Frey, so I figured I ought to speak up again since I took such a strong stance on the issue before. Yes, he’s confessed to fabricating things. Yes, it’s not 100% truthful. Yes, I still stand by every word I said in my previous post on the subject.

You want to talk about ethics? There are a lot of people out there telling much more damaging lies every day, with more widespread consequences. Worry about them. Confront them. Investigate them. No one died because he embellished a few characters. There are no orphaned children because the book was classified as a “memoir” rather than “fiction.”

I’m still haunted by things I read in that book. I keep going back to the root canal scene. That’s one of the parts of the book that’s under suspicion. Whether it happened or not, it’s still captivating. I know someone (who I won’t identify to protect their privacy) who’s in recovery with over a decade of sobriety. This person has to be very careful with what medications they use, no matter how much pain they’re in, or how detatched they’d like to be. They’ve been clean and sober for over a decade, yet there are choices they have to make every day with regards to keeping that sobriety. No, it’s not as intense as the root canal scene. Both, however, serve as examples of how that one drink after work can turn into 4 drinks and then passing out can turn into something that will direct the rest of your life.

James Frey didn’t knock squirrels out of trees with rocks just to be the one who got a medal and his picture in the paper for saving them. He didn’t make up a story for publication in The Washington Post as journalism. He wrote a book. A good, compelling book with solid writing. If you read the book and you got a glimmer of hope from it, whether it be about your own addiction or the demons a loved one has faced, then it’s still a worthwhile read. And if you’re pissed off that you read it because Oprah told you to and it turned out to not be everything she said it was … well, I can’t help you.