ABSTRACT
As Jon Ronson's story moves through the contexts of documentary, nonfiction literature, and feature film, adjusting its claims to believability along the way, it also reveals a surprising blind spot in the study of adaptation: the role of the media itself in the adaptive process. This chapter follows some of those trajectories, to take measure of the distance between the Fourth Estate and the house of adaptation. While editors Marta Minier and Maddalena Pennacchia focus on the specific genre of biography, Laurence Raw and Defne Ersin Tutan broaden their focus to The Adaptation of History itself in a edited collection. The sticker adorning Going Clear's cover not only marks that particular form of adaptation—it also points to the inextricability of the adaptation and news industries themselves. A number of adaptations characterized as true stories are founded in the daily news.
