Australian Has Another Go At Beah’s Story

By Ron Hogan on February 4, 2008 9:02 AM

If you ever want to dismiss the concept of corporate media monopolies as a silly conspiracy, the controversy currently being waged over Ishmael Beah‘s A Long Way Gone offers a compelling argument in your favor: If News Corp. were a smoothly running synergistic conglomerate, after all, would The Australian keep hammering away at an author who’s being published by HarperCollins in the UK and Australia? The Australian reporters continue their investigative assault on Beah’s account of the time he spent as a child soldier in Sierra Leone, with Peter Wilson filing a story in Saturday’s paper containing claims of documentation refuting Beah’s timeline.

This story followed an interview with Janice Harayda (you remember, our showtune-writing pal) in which the former National Book Critics Circle suggested that American readers “just wanted to believe [Beah]… and when people want really badly to believe something they tend to relax their critical standards.” Then Wilson, who’s spearheaded the paper’s coverage of Beah, tried confronting Beah at a public reading in London, with little success. There’s even an op-ed piece from Simon Caterson comparing Beah to established “fake” memoirists like Norma Khouri. (I’m surprised he didn’t invoke Rigoberto Menchu for the win.)

The Sunday Times of London (another News Corp. paper) plays the story right down the middle, as Bryan Appleyard‘s interview with Beah gives the young author ample opportunity to state his case, but adds that some of his supporters have actually been rather unhelpful by appearing “less interested in truth than in rhetoric.” So who should we believe? Appleyard can’t (won’t?) say: “I only know,” he closes his article, “what I have been told by a very diligent reporter and a man with a childlike face and a hypnotic gaze.”