The American Association of Petroleum Geologists has announced that it is giving its annual journalism award to . . . Michael Crichton.
The association’s spokesman acknowledged that Crichton’s medium is fiction, not journalism, but said that his work has “the absolute ring of truth.”
I assume that The Colbert Report will have the AAPG for lunch. “The absolute ring of truth” is clearly a species of “truthiness,” and “truthiness,” as we all know, is what we get from people whose job it is to bring us the truth. Unlike Crichton, whose job it is to make things up. It is imperative that we keep truth and fact in their proper places.