Déjà Vu

It would seem to me that we have already discussed this during our first week. Then we had decided that fabrication not okay. I would think that hypothetical anecdotes and sources are considered to be fabricated, so I’m not sure why we are even discussing this…again. Well, I’ll play; let’s spin.
As we have seen earlier, the rules that govern soft news are a little more flexible than those that rule hard news. I can think of one situation where it may be permissible to concoct an anecdote, maybe even ideal. Let’s say you have a number of factual occurrences that really work together to illustrate the central figure of your story. But to tell them all would take too much space. It might be okay to wrap all poignant points into one neatly crafted tale. Of course you would have to say something like “that may as well have been the case,” or “that’s how it should have happened” to let your reader know that this isn’t exactly what happened.
Of course, you do still need a source to do this. So it might (and I stress might) be okay to fabricate an anecdote, as long as it isn’t misleading, but it is never (and I stress never) okay to hypothesize a source.
Well, it may not be a circle, but the pressure of newspaper space may put a twist on the rules on fabrication. As with ice cream, twist works best with soft serve.