In my callow youth, as I tried to shape and define myself, journalism seemed the most attractive or enlightened or potential-shimmering pursuit around which to wrap an identity. It formed the path I walked throughout my teens and early 20s. But the pony I eventually rode to town was fiction-writing, in the mid-1980s, the same pony I intend to ride out of town in the last decades–or who knows, years–of my life. Why the bias? Why this and not that, since both disciplines have provided equally welcome homes for my writer’s voice and sensibilities? No answer, except to say still and forever, I will be torn between the two, fiction and nonfiction, marriage and promiscuity, living an imaginary life internally and bearing witness to the firehose-in-your-face-blast of the external, between invention and reportage, between the profound truths that spin out of elegant lies and the profoundly damaging lies that are the inevitable by-product of inauthentic truths. For a writer, both this and that, you might agree, are spellbinding. “The poles of fiction and nonfiction are constantly bouncing their force fields back and forth between each other,” writes the brilliant David Shields in Reality Hunger, his manifesto on the age-old blurring between the two genres. “What I want,” says Shields, “is the real world, with all its hard edges, but the real world fully imagined and fully written, not merely reported.”

But of course I’m as flabbergasted as everyone else that here in America in the 21st century, the Fourth Estate, a free society’s fail-safe mechanism against government gone wild, has faltered in its mission, enabling the administration’s disasters while disabling its own institutions for the sake of the voracious corporate metabolism, fueled by profit margins at the expense of principle. The establishment press looks pretty tarnished these days–“the drive-by media,” the clown Rush Limbaugh calls them, that leering pimp of the spectacle (Chris Matthews is a leering pimp as well). And it’s hard to feel sorry for the mainstreamers, because if you lose your integrity, it’s not because some one took it away, it’s always because you gave it away.

The vital difference between a mainstream journalist and a disciple of literary journalism like myself is not the real and pragmatic distinction between front page and feature page, or between hard news and soft news—the reportorial skills that produce one also produce the other—but a fundamental disagreement about objectivity, a myth in which I find no currency and which can help explain the astronomical gap between, say, a Judith Miller writing about WMDs, and a Sy Hersch writing about the same topic. Verifiable facts are objective entities, for a day, a year or a century, until contradictory verifiable facts emerge. The mainstream journalists I know bend over backwards to be objective. But it’s a metaphysical impossibility—even if they were machines, someone would have to program them. Editors and publishers are never objective, the illusion that they are is specious, and their contrived attempts at fairness are usually misleading or obfuscating, hammering unequal positions and sources of disproportionate merit into a fraudulent balance. I’ve withdrawn commissioned articles from The New York Times Magazine and from Harper’s Magazine over political disagreements with the editors. I’ve declined to write op-ed pieces for the Wall Street Journal and The Times because an editor has expected me to promote an ideological point of view I did not share and the facts on the ground did not support. Fair enough, on both sides of the line, as far as I’m concerned; every journalist worthy of respect–and they are legion–fights such battles continuously. The friction between office and field, between objectivity and subjectivity, helps define and sharpen their professionalism, while making everybody nuts to boot.

From the very beginning of my life as a journalist–high school newspaper, University of Missouri J-School (magazine sequence, thank you), cub reporter, agricultural journalist in the Peace Corps (the things I could tell you about banana disease!)–my own narrow comfort zone (which makes me basically unemployable) and my own expansive sensibilities about language and information and how they best combine to create knowledge in order to express the ineffable (otherwise known as reality, that most controversial and diverse aspect of human existence) have turned me in the direction of what’s been called (wrongly, and grandiosely, in my opinion) New Journalism.