The funny thing is,
Daisey was not the first time narrative journalism – aka documentary media – has waltzed down the path to fiction.
Famously, we have the film Nanook of the North and the book Wisconsin Death Trip,
case studies I covered when I was in journalism program, before TAL.
Today, we might call these works docudrama,
but the blurring of the line between drama and journalism remains.
There was also that Der Spiegel journalist that wrote effectively a completely made up fiction about an American town called "Fergus Falls. The followup investigation of which discovered a number of additional stories that ranged from highly exaggerated to completely made up.
The danger of trying to tell a narrative with journalism is the tendency to decide on the narrative you want to tell, and gather facts (or I guess make them up) to fit that narrative, rather than finding a narrative in the fact that lets you tell their story.
