Responsibility can feel like a tricky idea for journalists. Typically, we default to what our traditional practice reminds us: we owe the reader.
But what of the people whose stories we tell? What do we owe them?
I am not speaking of subjects with whom we have an adversarial relationship, or of people who, by dint of their positions and power, are familiar with how the game is played and are skilled at battling to make sure their agendas, not ours, carry the day.
Rather, I am speaking, for lack of a better term, of “civilians,” men and women who might have never spoken with journalists and who, sometimes seemingly out of nowhere, will be contacted by a reporter who finds their stories so interesting they’d like to hear more.
There is nothing quite so flattering as having a stranger sit across from you, so caught up in what you have to say that they want to record everything. A skilled journalist can keep someone talking forever – which means that people will inevitably reveal things that they have long kept to themselves.
A few weeks ago, I went to hear my friend and colleague, Alexander Stille, talk about his terrific new book, “The Sullivanians.” Suffice it to say that any book that has the words sex, psychotherapy, and commune in the subtitle is sure to draw attention, as well as raised eyebrows about those whose stories it tells.
Stille tells the story of a cult, hiding in plain sight not in a remote enclave but on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. To find and tell the story he contacted as many of the hundreds of members of the commune as he could, as well as the children who suffered mightily coming of age in a world where the bonds between them and their parents were purposefully severed.
Not everyone wanted to talk, which is their right. But many did and as they began, Stille found himself hearing stories from people who felt the need to tell someone about what they had experienced, and more painfully, what they had done. And some of what they did was awful.
I wanted to know about his experience, hearing about theirs, and deciding what to do with what he learned. I began by asking what we owe people in return for their honesty and their openness.
He replied: “For starters, I think we owe sources our respect and the willingness to genuinely listen. In the case of ‘The Sullivanians,’ about a psychoanalytic institute that created a community of people prepared to live by the precepts of their therapists, I felt it was very important to put aside any kind of judgment or preconceptions about this group and the people who participated in its life. The group became, by general consensus, a cult, with its members doing things that they later regretted: sending very young children to boarding school, breaking up close relationships between people who wanted to be together, saying nothing when the leadership acted cruelly toward their friends. It seemed very important to me to understand how these smart and well-educated people made the choices they did, how their experience in the group fit into the trajectory of their lives and into the zeitgeist of their times. Without that initial act of empathy and listening, the group’s experience would not make any sense.”
But how, I asked, do we strike a balance between our obligations to readers and to the subjects of the story?
He wrote: “There is a fundamental tension in a book of this kind – it is the contradiction that Janet Malcolm identified in her brilliant and provocative book ‘The Journalist and the Murder,’ which begins with the famous lines: ‘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.’
“This is, of course, a very extreme statement meant to provoke debate and thought. But what it gets at, which seems very real to me, is that the agenda of the writer and the agenda of the interview subject are fundamentally different. The writer is trying to write the best book or article they can, get as much information as they can, create an atmosphere in which the subject will open up, start and keep talking. The interview subject may think, ‘finally someone is going to tell my story’ when, inevitably, the writer is actually telling their own story, the one they have decided is the story. In the extreme case that Malcolm wrote about --Joe McGinniss’s book about accused killer Jeffrey MacDonald -- McGinniss violated some basic rules: he shared financial profits with his subject and actively misled MacDonald, telling him he fervently believed in his innocence when, in fact, he had concluded that MacDonald was guilty.
“In my case, I am amazed at the trust and openness my subjects demonstrated, telling me about some of the most painful and intimate chapters of their lives. As one ex-group member (not someone I had interviewed) wrote to me recently: ‘People were really brave to open up to you. I am mind-blown by how much went on.’ What I think I owed them primarily was to understand their stories as fully as possible. To never lose sight of their humanity. Not to sensationalize or use the intimate facts they disclose in a cheap or reckless way. I think it was especially important to contextualize their experience so that it made sense. I am sure there are some people who regret they told me as much as they did but I got an e-mail from one of the important characters in the book who wrote the following:
‘When I got to that part I kind of braced myself for something...I'm not sure what...maybe being publicly misunderstood...but I had the opposite experience.
In the whole journey of talking with you I felt deeply listened to. Reading what you wrote about me and about the world I fell into, I am actually learning about myself.’
“That was one of the most moving and gratifying responses to anything I have ever written.”
Finally, Stille did something frowned upon by many journalists, but in fact practiced by many (myself included) who have spent a lot of time talking with non-adversarial subjects who have opened up about themselves and their lives: he showed them in advance what he had written about them.
“It is generally an article of faith in journalism – and one I generally preach to my students -- that you should never show your work to your interview subjects before you publish. In this case, I strayed from that rule on several occasions. Several of my most important interview subjects, who, in effect became the ‘main characters’ of my book, showed extraordinary trust in sharing some of the most intimate and painful details of their lives with me and I felt I owed them a similar level of trust. I certainly didn’t want them to open my book and be shocked by what I had included of their story. Moreover, I really didn’t want to diminish the book by getting certain facts wrong – even small things – if I could possibly help it.
“So, I shared early drafts of the book with five or six of the people I had quoted the most, whose stories I gave in depth and shared chapters or groups of chapters with a series of other people whose stories I had treated in a bit less depth. The process was, on the whole, extremely positive. People corrected a handful of factual mistakes, asked for a few minor changes but were remarkably hands-off and respectful of my editorial independence. The readings stimulated further recollections on their part, added new valuable details to the book and improved the book.
“I should point out that the process was not all smooth sailing. I had one subject who was extremely upset to find herself in the book. I had done a very long and (to me) extremely moving interview with this young woman. She had asked that we speak ‘on background,’ concerned that the people she worked with didn’t know her personal history. I took this to mean that I could use her story – which she told to me in great and heartbreaking detail – as long as I changed her name. She didn’t understand it that way. I decided to remove her story from the book because I felt her confusion over the terms of the interview were genuine.
“More importantly, I realized that I was at risk of repeating what had been the central trauma of her life as a child in this group: having no agency and no control over her life and experience. Doing that did not seem worth making one chapter of my book a little better. In another instance, another subject claimed he didn’t realize that we were doing an interview and asked to be taken out of the book. In this case, I didn’t accede to his request. In my correspondence with him, I had specifically stated that I wanted to “interview him about his experience.” I showed up and conducted our conversation with two tape recorders rolling and my notebook open. This person had worked for the New York Times for many years and had been an adult while in the group. I didn’t think he – a mature and media savvy adult -- was owed a “do over.”
“More complicated was the situation involving people who had chosen not to speak with me but who are mentioned by others whom I did interview. I contacted them, agreed to discuss the passages in which they appeared. Some chose to take me up on it, others did not.”
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We wanted to share with you our newest story — a powerful and haunting piece about what happens when a nation is overwhelmed by a mental health crisis and has almost no one to help.
In "Mother of the Crazy People," author Minmin Low focuses on the story of one nurse -- one of a just handful of trained professionals trying to help those struggling with often severe mental illness in Sierra Leone, a benighted nation that has endured civil war, Ebola, and desperate poverty. Through her story Minmin captures in often searing detail the tragedy that continues to plague this society.
If you are as moved by the story as we are, we hope you will share it.
It is a story that needs to be told.
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Finally, Pro Tip of the week/month/year: Avoid at all costs stepping on a slab of marble in sneakers that have lost their tread to escape a sudden, unexpected downpour. You can always towel off. Lesson learned and I have a titanium plate in my elbow to remind me. Still, it’s good to be back.
It's very important to share with subjects in a book the chapters they will appear in before publication, and for exactly the reasons outlined in this essay: greater accuracy, more information, and in furtherance of the mission of subjects feeling heard. My own editor at Scribner seemed surprised when I announced that we couldn't go to press until I had done this, but it vastly improved my book and preserved the relationships I had formed with my subjects. As I explained to him, they are going to read it anyway--why not before it's too late to change anything?
Never sharing your work with a subject before publication was drilled into us in J-school and at newspapers, but I have always thought that principle is wrong. No wonder so much of what is published is inaccurate and reporters are generally reviled, when you pass on the opportunity to have your work scrutinized and take away a subject's agency.