I teach in a prominent journalism school and recently I committed heresy: I published a novel. It was about a Dominican-American teenage mother and was written in the voice of the girl herself.
Immediately, my students wanted to know why I had treated this subject as fiction. Why didn't I just go out and write about a real teenage mother, the way they would? Why did I have to let them down, the suggestion seemed to be, by making things up?
Then I shocked them even further. I told them that I had chosen fiction because I believed it could get me nearer to the truth.
The argument that fiction gets closer to the truth than reality is older than the proverbial hills. Mark Twain, I believe, said much the same thing as your bolded quote. I would make too much of the quote as an indictment of Professor Benedict.
Bingo!