The counterpart of the repudiated interview is the bogus, faked, or fictitious interview . Many persons do not wish to be interviewed , or they object to being interviewed on certain subjects, or it is inadvisable to give the interview at the time it is sought. But the reporter has been instructed to secure an interview and hence he has recourse to his own invention and imagination and the faked interview is published . At times the faked interview can be attributed only to desire for sensationalism or to paucity of genuine news items, and at such times every person deservedly prominent in the community or in public life seems to be at themercy of irresponsible interviewers.12 When the denial of the interview has been made, the interviewer may shield him self behind the statement that ignorance of a foreign language may have led him to misunderstand the person said to have given the interview ,13 or he may charge errors to the compositor,14 or he may leave the field without apology. The explanation or the denial made by the one who has suffered from the fictitious inter view may never overtake the published fabrication and the future historian is in grave danger of being led astray if he unwittingly accepts the bogus interview .15 To the historian of the present it seems the most objectionable of all objectionable forms of the interview and in 1904 Goldwin Smith probably expressed the opinion of the guild in writing the president of the press club , Toronto , “ There ought if possible to be some check to false re-
13New York Evening Post, December 8, 1908. 13 An interviewer who understood only English and German cabled an interview purporting to have been conceded by Benedict XV who spoke only Italian and French . He apparently forestalled disavowal by using the saving clause , “ if I understood His Holiness aright.” — Daily papers, April 17-18, 1915. 14 A prominent author was reported as having been called " an intellectual ass;" the person making the alleged statement said that he had called him " an intellectual asset.” — New York Times, December 7 , 1914. 15 G . Stanley Hall states his experience with the manufactured interview in the New York Evening Post, September 10 , 1910 . Similar experiences are given by George A . Coe, New York Evening Post, October 1, 1908. See the press of August 12 , 1914, for fabricated interview attributed to Philip Snowden , M .P ., and the denial, August 26 , 1916 ; the press of Decem ber 25, 1915 , published an interview attributed to Mabel T . Boardman who denied it in the papers of December 27, 1915; the Danish press of January , 1916 , published an interview purporting to come from Henry Ford which was immediately denied . Numberless illustrations of this point could be given .
