Chapter 152: Double Dipping
We heard from Doubting in Devon the other day, a writer who had a question that while seemingly narrow, speaks to the larger and eternally vexing issue of the relationships we have with the people we write about.
Doubting wrote:
Dear Writerland,
My query is about wanting to return to elements unearthed while reporting stories, but doing so years later, and outside of the original purpose and frame intended and discussed.
I’ve been going over old transcripts and found that I’ve been asking people similar questions. About family. What drew me to these exchanges now aren’t the facts that were printed, but rather where we had strayed and shared something different. And that said more about them and me than the specific facts we covered. In unison, I believe they help express something I’m attempting to piece together. But it’s no longer with the excuse of discussing somebody else.
The recorder was on and the interview had started, and there’s nothing untowardly there. Should I send the transcripts to the subjects? Is it too soon? Perhaps I fear losing the approval implicit in what those individuals and I had shared then. And hampering something still taking shape.
Yours,
Doubting in Dalston (UK)
I replied:
Dear Doubting,
Your question reminded me that at the heart of most every movie depiction of reporters there is Cary Grant as Walter Burns in the original Front Page – the editor whose interest in the feelings of the subjects of the stories his paper publishes approximates the desire of a six-year-old for a steady diet of broccoli.
Grant’s fast talking/get-me-rewrite newshound personifies the image of journalist- as-jackal. I’d like to believe that there is more humanity in our field than we are given credit for. But then again, we are in the business of getting people – often strangers – to tell us things that are really none of our business. Then we set about telling everyone else what we learned. Even those who hang on our every word do not necessarily think well of us, much as they delight in the work we do.
Our relationships with our subjects should be complicated and messy, and if they are not, something is wrong. Reporters, for instance, delight in saying that the only way a journalist should look at a politician is down. But then you spend time with a politician only to discover that this person you are schooled to hold in contempt has lurking beneath their polished exterior, a soul, feelings, a life. This is not to say you should therefore abandon your skepticism and standard issue bullshit-o-meter. Rather, that the best work – and here I mean journalism that possesses depth and nuance – begins with appreciating the complexity of the relationships you have with the people whose stories you tell.
The late Janet Malcolm earned a lasting place in every journalism ethics class with the open paragraph of her essay, The Journalism and the Murderer, when she posited that “every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”
What she said is true, up to a point. The point being that in Malcolm’s harsh assessment no journalist is capable of appreciating the position and power their work affords them. Easy to dismiss us all as Walter Burns. But I’ve been doing this long enough and know many journalist friends who agonize over how they do their work, and the impact of their words. Because you do learn early on that people will often feel betrayed even if that was never your intention.
How could they not when we set about seducing them, allowing them to believe in the illusion we create: that an interview that sounds and feels like an ordinary conversation is an illusion; the reality is that the interview is our way of subtly probing for the opening that will lead us to someplace revealing.
Our subjects do not know that when we hear from them what we are hoping to hear we are as thrilled by our discovery, as we are delighted by our skill at unearthing it. Clever us. Nor do they generally know what happens when many of us sit down to assess what they told us and begin asking ourselves what benefit comes from sharing something -- a subject they may have thought was just between friends. Albeit a friend with a notebook, whose interest felt so flattering.
Journalists, if they are doing their work the right way, appreciate that they will always confront moral dilemmas, some broad and some intimate, like those that force us to decide what to include in our stories and what to keep to ourselves: Does this fact or detail advance the story? Or is it just something we were clever enough to discover? Am I doing my work well and fully if I reveal certain facts? Do the same rules apply if I am writing about someone who is seasoned in the ways of journalists – read: powerful people – as I am when I’m telling the story of someone new to this game who does not understand the rules and whom I therefore have at a disadvantage? To whom am I responsible, the reader, or the subject, or both?
Which leads back to Doubting’s quandary: You conduct an interview. You write your story. You move on. And then, some time later you recall or come across that interview and discover things that may not have interested you at the time, but do now. You possess the transcript. The interview was on the record. Which means that the transcript is, technically, yours.
But are the words?
There is, strictly speaking, nothing stopping you from drawing on that interview for another story, no rules that I am aware of that specifies that what someone says in an interview is useable only for that original story.
Or by drawing on those words for a different, and unstated purpose, is akin to a journalistic bait-and-switch: I know the subject of the interview was the aviation industry but you did mention something about the challenges of a blended family. And now that’s the story I’m working on and damn, what you said was so revealing. So…thanks for that.
My gut says no. My gut, dear Doubting, says you have to go back and ask if it’s okay. You’ve changed the terms of your relationship, of the understanding, tacit or explicit, of your exchange: I asked for A and you gave me A but you also gave me B.
You need to go back because you also need to understand why in a conversation about one thing your subject felt the need or desire to tell you about something else. Perhaps in discovering the motivation you may open the way to learn more, to understand more fully.
Powerful people are often characterized by journalists as “fair game.” The operative word is game. It suggests hunting, and by extension aggression that ends with a victor and its prey.
This should make you a little uncomfortable. Not so uncomfortable that it prevents you from doing your work, from asking difficult questions, from deciding that discomfiting information should be shared, from recognizing that people will feel you’ve betrayed them.
But it should give you pause. Walter Burns did not pause. He hunted. He is a character drawn from real life. And a part of him lives in us.
Best that we remember it.
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Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture.