An interviewee can reject a fabricated report and refuse to allow its publication.

Evidence

To be sure, I did have a vague sense of unease about the imprecise parts, but I dismissed it, to my knowledge there was no requirement for interviews to be recorded verbatim. So when Fløgstad’s letter fluttered into my post box some days later and I held it in my hands, I was blissfully unsuspecting. Although my palms were sweaty and my heart was pounding. Spring had come, the sun warmed, I was wearing trainers, a T-shirt and jeans and was on my way to the music conservatory where a pal of my cousin’s, Jon Olav, was going to give me drum lessons. It might have been wiser to leave the letter unopened because time was tight, but curiosity got the better of me, and, ambling towards the bus, I opened it. Held the printout of the interview. It was covered with red marks and red comments in the margin. ‘I never said this,’ I saw, ‘Imprecise,’ I saw, ‘No, no, no,’ I saw, ’???’ I saw, ‘Where did you get that from?’ I saw. Almost every sentence had been commented on in this way. — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 1861

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what are the journalistic norms for attribution and invention in interview reports, and at what point does reconstruction cross into fabrication that legitimately gets killed?