Monday, April 02, 2012

Mike Check! Reading Between the Lines of the Daisey Story | Motherboard:

How is David Foster Wallace’s defense that “I’m not a journalist, and I don’t pretend to be one” (yet having his work published in Journals) different from Daisey’s “it’s not journalism… It’s theater”? Is it because Wallace was independently known as a fiction writer? Or because he was highly esteemed by the literati? Even though The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs was well-received by critics before earning a This American Life treatment, Daisey was a relative unknown until now. Does that make him an easier target?

Or, is it the audience that matters, or the kind of story they’re hearing?