Pincus's reportorial malpractice wouldn't have been so problematic if his article had just been one of many articles in the Washington Post about Freeman's appointment.
As long as there are journalists willing to risk it all in war zones, there will be books that provide the kind of reportorial insights unavailable from soldiers, the Pentagon and the White House.
Kushner employs a similarly eerie confidence throughout her novel, which constantly entwines the invented with the real, and she often uses the power of invention to give her fiction the authenticity of the reportorial, the solidity of the historical.