The New Press (January 2009)

Truth is an elusive concept. Debates about its nature — of even the very possibility of it — have raged in religious, scientific, and philosophical circles for millennia. Most of us think we know what it is…until we’re pressed to define it. The problem is similar to Augustine’s comment about time: “If no one asks of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.”

Perhaps it is this difficulty over defining truth that leads us to great frustration when we uncover someone who traffics in certain types of deception. It’s not just that they do so for their own gain — and worse yet, at our expense. It’s something more fundamental than that. A person who deceives us precludes us from making a genuine choice. Moreover, deception reveals a deep disregard for the sense we have about the way things are. We may not be able to explain what truth is, or even prove that there is such a thing, but we don’t like our basic beliefs in it disrespected.

Certainly, we don’t think all faking is bad. I doubt anyone seriously entertains the possibility, for example, that they’ve been deceived when they watch a movie or read a novel — maybe there’s some doubt about the quality of the faking, but there’s no worry that they’ve actually been duped.

Then there are the occasions when deception of a certain sort is actually edifying. As practiced by 19^th century Danish religious philosopher and the father of existentialism, Søren Kierkegaard — or at least his various philosophical pseudonyms! — indirect communication is the best sort of deception. It is a method of ‘taking another’s illusions as good money,’ only to prove the currency is counterfeit. It’s a gentle way of teaching. If we think, for example, about how annoyed we get when someone tells us we’re wrong, what better method of teaching us this fact than by going along with us and letting us find that out for ourselves? Suppose you and I want to go grab a beer, and I insist there’s a bar right around the corner, while you insist there isn’t. Rather than the tedious yes-there-is-no-there-isn’t game, you decide to say, “Okay, Mia, let’s go to that bar. So we go walking around the corner and, behold! There’s no bar.” Now I am forced to abandon my belief about the bar around the corner.

It’s clear there are lots of other ways that deception can occur. Paul Maliszewski is an expert on the topic. He was inspired to fakery years ago, when his job as a reporter for an upstate New York financial newspaper left him feeling intellectually and professionally bankrupt. In his forthcoming book,  succinctly plumbs the astonishing depths of the history of deception. His introductory story, “I, Faker,” sets the stage for both the theme of the book, along with the ever-present moral and conceptual vagaries that attend it.

“I, Faker” tells the story of Maliszweski’s time as a reporter at the aforementioned New York financial paper. Paul was bored and disillusioned. He believed that the publisher didn’t really want him to write investigative or analytical stories that could actually get people to think, but rather milquetoast profiles that followed a standard formula which “insured that it all came out looking the same as the next story, and the next story and the next.”

So put off by this approach was Maliszewski that he decided a specific form of deception was in order –namely satire. He made up companies, people, places — you name it, he made it up — meant to mock the very intellectual inertia he saw all around him. When the New Republic Stephen Glass scandal broke (the story later became a film, Shattered Glass, starring Hayden Christensen and Peter Saarsgaard), Maliszewski writes, “I thought I had found a coconspirator. Here, maybe, was someone else who understood the restrictions of journalism and bristled against them.” What Maliszewski learned, however, was that Glass was no satirist bent on an indirect critique of the standard journalistic forms. Instead, Glass was something else altogether. He was working within the standard system in order to get away with his deception. Maliszewski tells us that people were duped by Glass because he gave them just what they wanted. The New Republic editors, Maliszewski claims, “ran Glass’s writing because it did everything that good writing in The New Republic is expected to do. A Glass article told you what you assumed was, in fact, true…and it slyly congratulated you on the intelligence of your suspicions.”

Disappointed by the Glass affair, Maliszewski continued creating a plethora of fictitious financial profiles. He was so good at creating companies and people — or perhaps his readers were so good at wanting to believe in them — that he eventually found himself on the wrong side of the New York state attorney general’s office.

Maliszewski had created a new reporter, Noah Warren-Man, who spun a story about a fake company, TRI and its president, Irving T. Fuller. TRI stood for Teloperators Rex, Inc., after Fuller’s fascination with dinosaurs and Darwin. The company itself was at the fore of a “revolutionary idea,” namely “using people to answer telephones.” The resulting fake article, entitled “TRI Brings On-Call Phone Personnel to the North Country,” was accompanied by a fake website and press releases for it. Maliszewski was nothing if not thorough. So thorough was he in creating this outrageously false company that he had Fuller post fake press releases from New York Governor George Pataki’s office about windfall programs that would benefit TRI.

Some journalists recognized Maliszewski’s hoax, but others didn’t. Soon enough, the press releases, including those supposedly from the governor’s office, had been co-opted by a number of newspapers. The stories in those papers, in other words, were almost identical to the press releases. Eventually, questions arose about the stories. So, when the folks from the attorney general’s office showed up, they wanted to know why Maliszewski’s press releases looked frighteningly like those issued by the governor’s office. What they didn’t know, apparently, was that every one of them — including those said to originate from the governor’s office — were fakes.

When the real story came out — which, by the way, implicated those papers that had run with the fakes without bothering to fact-check — Maliszewski’s explanation was met with moral indignation on the part of the attorney general’s office. One of the investigators likened Maliszewski’s satire to “the guy who sees a weakness in the security of the bank and so robs the bank to prove it can be done instead of using [his] gifts and intelligence to fix the problem in a straightforward manner.”

This, it seems to me, is the crux of the matter in Mileszewski’s case and with many instances of the form of deception known as satire. What counts as “straightforward,” especially where such an approach is heard with deaf ears, is problematic. A satire such as Jonathon Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” would not be subjected to the same scrutiny as Maliszewski’s, not because it’s not a classic piece of writing, but because it’s not as subtle.

In order to avoid charges, Maliszewski had to write a detailed account of his satirical “project,” and even then wasn’t considered safe from future prosecution. Maliszewski got the last word, however. After his old paper apologized to its readers for being victims of a hoax, one of Maliszewski’s creations, and freelance contributors to the same paper, wrote in to congratulate the publisher on having the guts to admit being duped. Perhaps the publisher should have admitted to a lack of critical thinking about his profession, since that’s what prompted Maliszewski in the first place.

Maliszewski told the truth through deception, i.e. through satire. In this way, he believes he is morally, diametrically opposed to those who merely deceive, such as Stephen Glass or Jayson Blair — the latter of whom wrote a series of utterly fictitious and arguably dangerous profiles of former P.O.W. Pfc. Jessica Lynch at the outset of the Iraq war.

Once Maliszewski’s own story is told, and once he scans a stunning array of diverse types of deceptive writers, we are primed for anything. Insofar as our understanding of the truth has been tipped, if not upended, Maliszewski has us right where he wants us. The remaining essays in Fakers explore the variations on the theme, all of which are fascinating. Whether talking about Internet hoaxes or early American con-artists, Maliszewski takes us from one side of the bending arc of truth to the other, and — to cram in another metaphor — we’re never sure exactly of the moment it slips like a fish through our fingers. At the end of Fakers, we may still be bereft of understanding what truth is, but this terrific little compilation offers us a glimpse of its margins. Fortunately for us, the author respectfully leaves us to make up our own minds, even if we can’t make up the truth.