[SamAdams76]

I read the McGinniss crime books of the 1980s like Blind Faith and Fatal Vision. It did seem like he took a lot of artistic license with his true crime books. For example, he would name the songs that were playing in the car radio as the subjects of his book were driving down the highway. How could you get details like that for a non-fiction book? I can't even remember what songs were on the car radio on my way to work this morning.

Anyway, I'm glad to hear that Sarah Palin might not be the perfect human being after all. She was starting to scare me there for a while. I want a real person as my next president, not the Virgin Mary.

[x]

I read the McGinniss crime books of the 1980s like Blind Faith and Fatal Vision. It did seem like he took a lot of artistic license with his true crime books. For example, he would name the songs that were playing in the car radio as the subjects of his book were driving down the highway. How could you get details like that for a non-fiction book? I can't even remember what songs were on the car radio on my way to work this morning.

________________

See his famous controversy with Janet Malcolm.

She wrote:

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and "the public's right to know"; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.

A lot of journalists weighed in on one side or the other.