Tracey Scott Wilson’s 'The Story' and the enduring debate on media truth

If our ability to discern fake news from fact is a hot topic today, Tracey Scott Wilson was on to it more than two decades ago. As a child, the playwright’s father trained her to watch the news every night and discuss it with her three siblings. It meant that she was well placed in the early 00s to spot how stations such as Fox News were veering away from objective reporting to become angled towards a given agenda.

By this point a real-life story had been percolating in Wilson’s mind for more than two decades: in 1981, Janet Cooke, a young, ambitious Black American reporter at The Washington Post, had been exposed as a liar. Cooke had just won the Pulitzer prize for her news story about an eight-year-old drug addict, which turned out to be invented. Cooke was discredited, both for her reporting and for embellishing her CV, and was forced to hand back her prize two days after receiving it.

That scandal became the engine for The Story, Wilson’s breakthrough play at the Public Theater in New York in 2003, now being staged at the National Theatre in London.

Wilson, a rangy, affable presence, is delighted by her play’s revival at a time when the notion of truth, and the media’s part in producing it, couldn’t be more contested. She was a teenager when the Cooke story emerged and a conversation with her father has stayed with her. “He said ‘It’s such a shame she won it for writing something so negative [about the Black community].’ And then when they said the story was a lie, it was a whole other thing.”

A few years later, when she was working at the University of Minnesota at a student magazine, she returned to the story. “We had access to [the digital newspaper archive] LexisNexis. I was bored half the time in that job so I’d just look up stories and one day I thought ‘I wonder what happened to Janet Cooke.’ So I put it in LexisNexis and went down a rabbit hole. I thought ‘what a great character she is’.”

Her play’s protagonist, Yvonne, is quite the character too, a Black American junior reporter with a CV that takes in an Ivy League education by way of the Sorbonne. She is assigned to a section whose raison d’etre is to put a positive spin on the newspaper’s race coverage – happy stories featuring the local Black American community to offset the negative ones. It is too niche to hold Yvonne’s ambition so she begins her hunt for a story that will fast-track her to the national news desk, populated by, one imagines, white, male, big beasts.

Serendipitously, the play’s original run coincided with the breaking of another newspaper scandal involving Jayson Blair, a Black reporter who admitted to inventing and plagiarising stories while working for the New York Times. That story had race and class elements, just like Wilson’s play: Yvonne is a middle-class woman who sparks resentment and friction because of her (apparent) privilege. Through her, Wilson examines notions of who is deemed inside/outside the fold of the Black community.

“I was drawn to the idea of authenticity,” says Wilson, “which is a conversation we are having every single day around class, race, sexuality, and who is allowed to be the spokesperson.”

The play is also about women and ambition – the hard, raw kind that Yvonne encapsulates so uncompromisingly, especially now after a series of re-writes. “I wanted to bring Pat [a senior editor and Black woman] into this conversation. Pat and Yvonne are two sides of the same coin, they are both women who are being constantly punished for their ambition and being forced to do things because of their ambition.”

There was a false start for a London revival soon after its original staging in New York, when the Soho theatre, in London, invited Wilson to the UK for a reading. “I had never been overseas, I had to go and get a passport,” she says. “I was so excited. They put me up here for a week. I barely remember the reading because I was going to Westminster Abbey, and doing all the tourist things.”

It wasn’t picked up and Wilson went back home. “I was disappointed but I forgot about it. It was done a few times in the United States but I didn’t think it would be done again.”

It was only when she got the call from the National Theatre last year that she realised that her London trip hadn’t been wasted at all. Clint Dyer, this production’s director, had been at the Soho theatre reading as a twentysomething actor. “I had a Zoom with [the NT] and Clint was there. I didn’t remember him but he said he had loved [the reading in 2003] and every single time he went to do a play in a theatre he would say ‘Have you read The Story?’”

Ironically, Wilson herself wanted to be a journalist and majored in the subject as a freshman until her professor at Rutgers University told her she wasn’t cut out for it because she editorialised too much: “He said ‘you just can’t be objective’.” She switched to English, first trying her hand at writing prose before hitting on her gift for script-writing. It’s not lost on her that everything her university professor told her about news journalism has ceased to matter for some organisations. “If I had carried on as a journalism major, I could’ve been a star!’” she jokes.

The Story is still set in 2003 but it seems like a pertinent – and potent – moment to stage it. The debate on who controls the narrative continues to rise in volume while the death of former Cambridge professor, Jason Arday, has revived charges of racial scapegoating. For Wilson, the concern is not just over news production but also the way we consume it. “I used to play basketball in high school. I remember when my team [the Los Angeles Lakers] lost, I didn’t want to read about it because it would make me feel bad. But it’s just sport so it doesn’t matter, right? Now it applies to everything, so if I don’t like reading this economic data because it makes me feel stressed out or I don’t like reading about this conflict in this country because it makes me feel bad … it’s become a case of reading the news that fits your perspective so you don’t have to feel bad about reality.”

Yet while it is evident that many media outlets are focusing on views-journalism, has news production ever really been neutral or objective? “There’s always been rags,” Wilson concedes, “but I think what’s happening now is that there is resignation and acceptance that this is what it is, as opposed to ‘I know that that’s a rag, but this is a paper of note that tries to tell an objective truth.’”

She thinks the scandal at the heart of her play would resonate differently today too. “Everything that happens would now happen in a week and we’d forget about it, or it would live on in a particular niche on the internet. The fury only lasts 20 minutes now because there’s another fresh fury.”

So is this her condemnation of the media machine that she once dreamed of joining?

“I don’t want to say it’s a blanket condemnation. You can criticise the big mainstream papers, but you also have these people on the internet who are saying ‘This is the news from Gaza’. There are people committed to trying to tell the truth.”