"Journalist invents story"? Tell us something we didn't know

The Polish love their heroes. Milan Kundera once wrote that it was a nation that produced mercurial men, the sort who would mount a horse in defence of their country against the tanks of invading armies. Since the 1960s, journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski has been among them, but now his reputation is unravelling.

Kapuscinski was responsible for producing some of the finest reportage on the post-colonial era. Living on the modest wages and expenses of the Polish Press agency, he covered the Iranian revolution, the Honduras-El Salvador soccer war, and Africa from Angola to Ethiopia. As well as sending regular dispatches back to his homeland, still under the grip of blackout communism at the time, he went on to turn his experiences into expressionist histories that have been read the world over.

Now, however, a new biography by Artur Domoslawski offers evidence that Kapuscinski’s reports about the Mexican student massacre of 1968 were invented. “I was there,” Kapuscinski had claimed. No he wasn’t, says Domoslawski. Yet even if Domoslawski is right, does it matter?



That Kapuscinski's journalism strayed over the boundaries of fact has been alleged many times. His elaborate account of the court of Haile Selassie, Ethiopia's last emperor, has long been questioned, as has his supposed acquaintance with Che Guevara.

But in today’s journalism, who is ever really "there"? The latest rounds of pro and anti-government rallies in Iran were reported either through the sanctioned, and therefore skewed, versions of events put out by the Iranian government, or from some half-authenticated voices picked up on Twitter in London. When Israel invaded Gaza at the end of 2008, there was nobody there to watch. The Israelis had asked all western journalists to leave, and Al-Jazeera was the only international channel who managed to sneak under enemy lines. At a time when major media outlets are cutting back their international bureaux it is not unheard-of for a journalist in China to be reporting on India or one man in Johannesburg covering the whole of Africa. Not a dissimilar situation to the shoestring budgets of the Polish Press Agency, that left Kapuscinski in charge of fifty countries at a time. That anyone is ever "there" is part of the fallacy of modern journalism.

Kapuscinski wrote literary reportage, his defenders say, not fiction. But he also observed these revolutions and wars from an unusual angle. He was an admirer of Bronislaw Malinowski, the Polish anthropologist who broke the tradition of “from the verandah” fieldwork by going to live amongst the tribes he studied. Kapuscinski did this too. There is an episode in Shah of Shahs, Kapuscinski’s account of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, in which he is, by his own admission, reporting from a café in Iran where he was watching events unfolding on their television. The faces and moods of those around him are as revealing as the events themselves. They would be invisible in formal history but not in Kapuscinski's. And in this case, viewing events from afar, rather than from within the throng, gives a revealing perspective.

That may not excuse his absence and subsequent lie about being at the Mexican massacre. But Kapuscinski did, after all, certifiably make it to 27 revolutions across the world—more than many a thrill-chasing foreign reporter can dream of. If, on this occasion, he had shrugged at the incoming news of protests in Tlatelolco and instead taken refuge in a bar to nurse an extra cerveza, could we let him off the hook this time?