Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 53: News: Scoops, Lies and Videotape
Spring 1996
Who makes it? Who owns it? Should we believe it? With Phillip Knightley on his life in journalism; Lynda Schuster on a reporter killed by an anti-tank mine – her husband; Zoë Heller inside tabloid television; David Xiao on personal losses in the Kobe earthquake; Tom Pilston’s visual vocabulary of selling murder. Plus fiction by Paul Theroux and the hilarious début of Paul Beatty.
From this Issue
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Interesting if True
Phillip Knightley
‘The end of the war in the Pacific came just before I left school.’
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Brand Leader
Fintan O’Toole
‘It was a clear, uncomplicated space, a brand image, a label that could be stuck on a billion sauce bottles.’
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Full Disclosure
Zoë Heller
‘The speech he gave was bellicose. It was time, he told the people in the conference room, for them to pull their socks up.’
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Two Dead in Car Blast
Lynda Schuster
‘I can write about this now only because enough time has passed.’
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Writing for Nobody
Eric Jacobs
‘I have often wondered whether anybody ever read what I wrote.’
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Here Come the Tanks
Patrick Wright
‘In these civilian circumstances, unhampered by any opposition from aircraft, landmines, artillery or other tanks, the tank seems unstoppable.’
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TV is Good for You
Dan Jacobson
‘Television is constantly accused of encouraging apathy, sloth, passivity, illiteracy, mindlessness and docility among those who are addicted to watching it.’
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The Trial
Gordon Burn & Tom Pilston
‘There are constants in the media landscape, the images that, even half-seen, alert us to another excitingly dire occurrence.’
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Home is Here Now
David Xiao
‘I told June that the woman they uncovered was not our daughter.’
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The Lawyer’s Story
Paul Theroux
‘Bow tie, blue shirt, tight suit, cowboy boots—he was overdressed for Singapore.’
