Journalism | Editors-in-chief criticize the defense of fabricated stories: “Everything must be true”

Morning paper former editors-in-chief Matti Apunen and Jouko Jokinen have publicly defended the newspaper's former editor Matti Kuuselaa. Amulehti told on Friday that he had removed more than 500 of Kuusela's articles from the internet, when he revealed in his recent biography that he had fabricated the content of at least three of his articles.

Matti Apunen, who was the editor-in-chief of Aamulehti between 1998 and 2010, said on Friday HS, that Kuusela has always moved “on the boundary between fiction and basic journalism”.

Jouko Jokinen, who was the editor-in-chief of Aamulehti between 2010 and 2017, said on Saturday to HS that he “highly valued Kuusela's journalism”. According to him, Kuusela's stories were “very close to a fictional text”. Jokinen is currently Yle's editor-in-chief.

For a long time editor-in-chief of Long Play, an online publication specializing in articles Ilkka Karisto says that he is upset that Aamulehti's former editors-in-chief Apunen and Jokinen let it be understood that different rules of the game would prevail in so-called feature writing than in news journalism.

Karisto emphasizes that he is commenting on the matter on a general level, as he is not more familiar with Aamulehti's Matti Kuusela's story production.

“In feature writing, everything has to be true and verifiable,” says Karisto.

“What appears to the reader as an easy-to-read, enjoyable and perhaps even fictional text has often required an insane amount of clarification, interviews and fact-checking,” he continues.

Apunen told HS on Friday that he hoped that “there would still be room for experiments and play in journalism”. According to Karisto, that should be the case as well.

In his opinion, in journalism you can play with, for example, topic choices, perspectives and the narrator's voice. However, it is not related to Aamulehti's Matti Kuusela's revelation about his working methods.

“Now, based on the news, the question is that things have been invented on their own. It does not belong to any kind of journalism”, Karisto stresses.

Kariston as well as the editor-in-chief of the magazine Image Niklas Thesslund finds problematic a discussion in which it is understood that feature writing as if allows the editor to make things up.

Matti Kuusela himself also accused STT in what he gave in the interviewthat “now his narrative journalism is being questioned”.

“Kuusela admits that he made things up and talks about journalism despite that. You don't make things up in journalism. It's such a simple thing,” says Thesslund.

Feature writing cannot in any way deviate from journalism's requirement of truthfulness, he emphasizes. Therefore, even writing long stories that use fictional means is time-consuming.

“I know from my work how ungodly slow and demanding feature journalism is. It's slow and demanding precisely because things have to be true.”

Thesslund gives an imaginary example that he remembers having heard sometime before: If a journalist writes in his story that the interviewee is pulling his hair with his left hand, then you have to check that the interviewee really has a left hand.

Morning paper the former editors-in-chief Apunen and Jokinen have now said that they believe that the magazine's readers have certainly distinguished when Kuusela has written fiction.

In his biography, Matti Kuusela says, for example, that he fabricated his rowing article to revive the Swedish writer “Per-Olov Ekelöf” and his unfinished book “Båtman”. The story was published in Aamulehti's Valo supplement on August 1, 2008. In his story, Kuusela also mentions the birth and death years of the fictional Ekelöf.

Thesslund considers the article to be an example where the reader cannot necessarily know that he is reading fiction, even though Kuusela says that the imaginary writer's hands have turned into oars.

“It lacks a framework from which the reader would understand that they are reading a product of the imagination. When a person reads a newspaper, he is reading a journalistic product, where the basic assumption is that things are true,” says Thesslund.

Morning paper current editor-in-chief Sanna Keskinen wrote on Facebook on Saturday evening that the paper plans to go through the Kuusela stories that have been removed from the internet, but also possibly return them to readers.

“I'm not going to predict the time needed for the work or the number of things that may be brought back to view, but the work continues,” he wrote.