Well here's where it gets interesting.

But for some reason, I don't think a story about coal mines would have gotten the same amount of attention.

So we're talking about an ends-justify-means scenario here. But what are the ends? FoxConn is a safer place to work. However, FoxConn was already a safer place to work than Chinese coal mines, which kill several people per day without the world batting an eye.

What about Jayson Blair? On Jessica Lynch, Blair used a bunch of purple prose to play up the Rockwellian universe in which she'd grown up; in the end, Jessica Lynch ended up with a lot more limelight, something she definitely didn't want. Did it shorten the war?

Now - how 'bout Chernobyl? Did an imaginary story about a hot biker speed up the cleanup? Did it lower cancer rates? Did it increase medical funding? No, but it "raised awareness." Not so much of Chernobyl as a disaster, but as a background where spoiled exotics go on urban explorations. In the popular mindset, kidofspeed nudged Chernobyl away from "historic thing that happened in the Cold War" to "cool abandoned theme park to get stoned in." The movie Chernobyl Diaries doesn't happen without that Angelfire page.

So let's go to something a little muddier, like Janet Cooke. Read this and know that it was made up wholesale. She got a pulitzer for it:

Cooke resigned and returned the Prize. (It was awarded to Teresa Carpenter of The Village Voice.) She appeared on the Phil Donahue show in January 1982 and said that the high-pressure environment of the Post had corrupted her judgment. She said that her sources had hinted to her about the existence of a boy such as Jimmy, but unable to find him, she eventually created a story about him in order to satisfy her editors.

Here's what Bob Woodward had to say:

I believed it, we published it. Official questions had been raised, but we stood by the story and her. Internal questions had been raised, but none about her other work. The reports were about the story not sounding right, being based on anonymous sources, and primarily about purported lies [about] her personal life – [told by three reporters], two she had dated and one who felt in close competition with her. I think that the decision to nominate the story for a Pulitzer is of minimal consequence. I also think that it won is of little consequence. It is a brilliant story—fake and fraud that it is. It would be absurd for me or any other editor to review the authenticity or accuracy of stories that are nominated for prizes.

"It is a brilliant story—fake and fraud that it is. It would be absurd for me or any other editor to review the authenticity or accuracy of stories that are nominated for prizes."

The article definitely raised awareness of the drug problem in DC. It influenced drug policy in the United States in general, though - The War On Drugs, the imaginary "Crack Epidemic", the rise of the paramilitary DEA, all of it. Now - there probably were 8-year-old heroin addicts at the time of its writing. But their stories didn't get told. Which means all that influence is the influence of a lie.

That, fundamentally, is why we require our true stories to be true. That is why we accord more respect to nonfictional accounts than we do fictionalizations. For every story you make up and pretend to be true, you are ignoring a story that actually IS true and the truth is far more valuable in setting policy than opportunistic narration.

Joseph Kony is still at large, and he's still not even vaguely the nastiest dictator in Africa. "Going viral" is a far cry from "doing something" and even when it does, if it isn't true, it's harmful.

My opinion anyway. There's far too much extant injustice in the world to get hung up on made up shit. And frankly?

If I'm going to read a made-up story about a Russian chick who rides her Ninja around Chernobyl, it'd better be way more fucking AWESOME than kidofspeed. If you're gonna fake it, put your goddamn back into it. Holden Caulfield is way the fuck more awesome than James Frey.