From the book Fakers: Hoaxers, Con Artists, Counterfeiters, and Other Great Pretenders, by Paul Maliszewski:
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Otto Friedrich came to understand the high value assigned to narrative while working, in the early 1950s, for the United Press in its Paris bureau. While France fought for lost causes in the colonial uprisings of Algeria and Vietnam, Friedrich and his fellow reporters stayed well clear of both conflicts, the better to keep the cost of news-gathering to a minimum.
Instead, the writers were charged with taking bland press releases from the French government—so many insurgents killed, the terrorists on the run now—and transforming them into dramatic news articles. But editors found Friedrich’s work wanting.
“I was,” Friedrich recalls, “soon taken aside by the assistant bureau chief and scolded about what he called ‘your all-the-news-that’s-fit-to-print approach.'” Friedrich was told the job required some attention to facts, but a great deal of enthusiasm. Merely factual stories, ones that reported what happened, were likely to be spiked.
In time, Friedrich learned to stop worrying and love enthusiasm. “What is enthusiasm?” he asks in his essay “How to Be a War Correspondent.”
“It consists of writing about something as though it were exciting, even though you know nothing about it, even though you are thousand of miles away, even though it is not exciting at all. The basic technique involves verbs of action, lots of adjectives, a sure grasp of cliches, and a readiness to fill in gaps where the facts are missing.”
When the Agency France-Presse ticker altered the bureau that planes had just bombed the communists, the enthusiastic reporter wrote, “Waves of American-build Bearcat fighter-bombers zoomed low over cleverly camouflaged Red positions and rained down bombs and fiery napalm…”
In an enthusiastic story, Friedrich writes, soldiers “never ‘go’ anywhere; they ‘slog through waist-deep rice paddies,’ they ‘wade though turbulent flood-swollen streams,’ or they ‘knife through sweltering jungles.'”
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Otto Friedrich (born 1929, died 1995), was an American journalist, writer and historian. The son of the Harvard professor Carl Joachim Friedrich, he graduated from Harvard University in 1948 with a degree in history. Upon graduation, he became a journalist, eventually becoming the managing editor of the Saturday Evening Post in 1965. After the Post closed down, he spent the remainder of his career at Time magazine where he wrote more than 40 cover stories. During this time, he also authored more than 14 books on subjects ranging from the rise of Hollywood to the rise of the Third Reich. In 1970, he won the George Polk Award for his book Decline and Fall. — From Wikipedia
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