“Whatever Is Possible, Newspapers Treat as True”

The principle that newspapers treat whatever is possible as true defines a newsroom in which plausibility can stand in for verification. It appears not as an abstract maxim alone but as a working method: journalists discuss fabricating material to enliven the news, and Lucien de Rubempré discovers that what reaches readers may be altered to serve interests beyond the writer’s own judgment.

Plausibility as a newsroom rule

The principle is stated by Étienne Lousteau during a discussion of newspaper practice. When Hector Merlin proposes inventing stories about refusals of burial, Félicien Vernou warns that the major constitutional papers already have their own stock of such fabrications. Merlin explains the newsroom term canard as an incident made to look true and invented to enliven dull Paris news. The example makes the rule practical: invention is not presented as an exceptional lapse but as material that can be shaped to meet the appearance of plausibility.

Lousteau gives the principle its concise formulation: the newspaper treats as true whatever is probable, and that assumption is where the journalists begin. The distinction is consequential. The standard described is not whether an event has been established, but whether it can pass as credible. Probability becomes a working substitute for proof, allowing a story’s convincing surface to determine its usefulness in print.

The canard and borrowed authority

Merlin’s account gives the practice a history. He credits Benjamin Franklin with the canard, alongside the lightning rod and the republic, and says that Franklin’s fabricated overseas reports deceived the encyclopedists. In Merlin’s telling, Raynal incorporated two such stories into the Philosophical History of the Indies as authentic events: one about an Englishman selling the Black woman who had freed him after making her the mother of his child, and another about a pregnant young woman winning her case through a sublime plea. Merlin adds that Franklin later confessed to the fabrications at Necker’s house in Paris, to the embarrassment of the French philosophers.

The anecdote shows how a fabrication can acquire authority as it passes from one account into another. Once a plausible story is accepted and repeated by a respected work, its false origin can disappear from view. The rule therefore concerns more than the journalist’s first act of invention: it also describes the vulnerability of readers and institutions that treat credible narrative as established fact.

From manuscript gatekeeping to editorial control

Lucien encounters the press’s control over access before he learns how it controls published meaning. He approaches Vidal and Porchon with his historical novel, The Archer of Charles IX, describing it as serious work about the struggle between Catholics who supported absolute government and Protestants who sought a republic. Vidal replies that the firm is a commission bookseller rather than a publisher and that the books it undertakes on its own account are serious works—histories and summaries—backed by established names. The exchange makes the author’s route to publication dependent on institutional categories and reputation, not simply on the merits he claims for his manuscript.

At Dauriat’s bookshop, Lucien sees another form of gatekeeping. Dauriat brusquely asks who he is, and Lousteau intervenes to explain that he has brought Lucien. Later, when Lucien asks for the manuscript of The Daisies, Dauriat returns it in a markedly friendlier manner, apparently having read it. These encounters belong to the wider publishing world rather than directly illustrating the canard, but they clarify the power surrounding printed work: authors may submit and argue, while booksellers and editors decide what receives attention and in what form.

Lucien’s test and its reversal

Lucien experiences editorial intervention directly when he writes a deliberately harsh review of an Ambigu-Comique play. He wants to test whether he can, as journalists have told him, destroy a good play and make a bad one succeed. The play, he judges, is better than one at the Panorama-Dramatique, but he chooses a mordant attack as an experiment in his own influence.

The next day, while breakfasting with Coralie, Lucien opens the paper and finds that the review has been softened overnight. Its analytical wit remains, but its conclusion now favors the play, which is predicted to fill the theater’s coffers. The evidence does not identify who made the change; it does establish that the printed judgment differs from the one Lucien intended. He is furious, having believed himself indispensable and resolved not to be exploited. In this instance, the decisive transformation is not a fabricated event but an altered evaluation: the newspaper’s public meaning can be redirected even while the writer’s recognizable analysis survives.

Together, the newsroom maxim and Lucien’s altered review expose two related powers of the press. A story may be manufactured because it seems probable, and a judgment may be recast before publication because its consequences matter. The boundary between report, invention, and editorial interest is therefore unstable: what readers encounter as newspaper truth has already passed through choices about what sounds credible and what serves the paper’s purposes.