Oprah: Roy Peter Clark is a senior scholar and professor at the Poynter Institute. It's a school for journalists. So whose responsibility is it, do you think, to check the facts in a book?
Dr. Clark: I think there
needs to be, most important, truth in advertising. When James writes, "Remember
the truth. It's all that matters." That's such a powerful, powerful statement in
addiction, in recovery, in journalism, in race relations, and personal
relations, that I think the important thing that you're doing today is taking
that pendulum which says that "memoir is truthful except for the parts that are
lies" and you're reestablishing and you're challenging publishers to label
what's going on in the book. And that, I think, is what we should
do.
