Seperating fact from fiction

Since the dawn of reporting,journalists have come under scrutiny for how much of their copy is fact or fiction.

Today's Independent looks at the story of Ryszard Kapuscinski where yesterday,

a biography was published in Kapuscinski's native Poland which portrays much of his work as invention. Kapuscinski – Non Fiction, by the Polish journalist Artur Domoslavski, says he "consciously built on his status as a legend" and "extended the boundaries of reportage far into the realm of literature".

Ryszard Kapuscinski who died in 2007,dedicated forty years of his career to Africa and became famous for books, such as The Emperor (1978), on the fall of t Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and Another Day of Life (1976), a closely observed account of the collapse of Portuguese colonialism in Angola, .

Domoslavski says that the journalist famed for books such as The Soccer War and Imperium never met Guevara and many other figures he claimed to have known as a globetrotting reporter. His claims that he narrowly escaped death by firing squad are dismissed as fantasy; his insistence that his father was a prisoner of war in Russia, a lie.