Issues of confidence have divided the journalistic community in the past week, after three reporters quoted people who weren’t aware they would be published.
At the Brisbane Writers Festival last week, journalist and author Suki Kim went to a cocktail event held by the festival for its guests. While there, she shared her opinions on the controversial keynote she had just heard by Lionel Shriver. She voiced a common complaint about Shriver’s talk, which is that for all of Shriver’s talk of the empathy authors bring to their work, it was still the case that white authors were heard more often than those from minorities. She gave a personal example: she said her own book on North Korea hadn’t been as well received as a far less rigorously reported book, also about North Korea, written by a white author two years earlier.
A few days later, her comments were paraphrased in The New York Times. Turns out one of the men she’d been speaking to, Rod Nordland, was a reporter for The New York Times, who then wrote up the festival and quoted Kim’s comment.
Kim complained, and the NYT’s public editor looked into the issue. She was sympathetic to Kim’s expectations of privacy. But the Times itself is leaving the quote up and hasn’t offered an apology. According to the public editors’ piece on the issue, Nordland agrees with Kim’s characterisation of the circumstances of their discussion, but says she knew he was a journalist, and so she should have expected they were on the record.
Standards editor Phil Corbett said it would have been better if Nordland had checked if it was OK to use the comments, but he described the whole thing as a “clash of expectations”. Given she was in a hotel room full of people, Corbett said, “I’m not sure how much expectation of privacy there could reasonably be”.
At a public session the previous day, Kim had made the same substantive complaint, with one crucial difference — she hadn’t named the author to whom she was referring. She wants the quote removed; it’s still up.
Issues of when situations can be considered on or off the record are at the fore among Australian journalists as well, with books by former editor-in-chief of The Australian Chris Mitchell and BuzzFeed political editor Mark Di Stefano both accused of breaking confidences. Former prime minister Tony Abbott has said he is “disappointed” by passages in Mitchell’s book, one of which includes an account of Abbott making fun of his former political rival Julia Gillard and her body shape. Last night both authors were guests on The Drum, where host Julia Baird asked where they draw the line. Di Stefano said he took the view that everything was on the record unless explicitly stated:
“I truly believe that some people within the Australian political media like to sort of say that everything is off the record until it’s on the record. So, my approach to reporting a book and my approach to reporting at BuzzFeed, everything is on the record until it’s asked to be off. Somebody says to me, this is off the record, it’s a negotiation, so I say OK, let’s have a chat. It becomes off the record.”
Most political journalists consider all their interactions with politicians off the record unless otherwise negotiated, though some are famous for not sticking to the convention.
Mitchell said:
“I have retired, and most of them have, too. I think in my book, I’m talking about five prime ministers and Rupert Murdoch. I am not talking about other journos. My view on source protected confidentiality is that it’s absolute. But if somebody is — a prime minister is ringing me demand I sack a particular reporter or pull somebody off a story for instance, I think that’s a reasonable thing to relate in retirement. I also think that ordinary journos don’t know much about this. They know about their own dealings with politicians. They don’t know that the editor protects them year in and year out from a fate that for them and their families would be worse than death. Nobody is more powerful in this country than a prime minister. Certainly not an editor.”
The Australian Press Council doesn’t cover books, so people who feel that their confidences have been broken can’t make a complaint to the body if they feel in need of redress. It’s also a fraught issue because many authors of autobiographies and memoirs who have not worked as journalists also break confidences in the process of writing about their lives, without having previously worked in an industry with on and off the record.
a truly tedious article…..can’t the people at Crikey just clone Razer and Rundle?
Unfortunately you regularly get disposable Razer these days.
They’re not serious, any of them, are they? As anyone who works with non-fiction words of any kind well knows, the off/on the record ‘convention’ is pure epistemological game-playing, a laughably malleable and arbitrary journalistic con. In this 24-7 universal blitzkrieg of an Information Era it certainly belongs nowhere but consigned to the Museum of Non-Fiction Writerly Bullsh*t (curator: Janet Malcolm), but even back in the day when serious newspapers were arguably ‘The Record’ (as far as democratically-accessible public debate went), the distinction has always been self-serving and about as cast-iron as a filament of overcooked spaghetti anyway, with the willingness of ambitious hacks to disregard it a direct and infinitely adjustable function of the scale of any most-definitely-on-the-record ‘scoop’ supposedly ‘off the record’ information might spawn. (‘On the record’ meaning, of course, ‘on my record’ – by-lined, applaudable, award-winning, etc.)
The suite of such dubious information handling ‘conventions’ that non-fiction writers (including journo’s) have come to deploy as vocational short-cut entitlements is loooong, and includes the use of ‘anonymous’ (ie no better than, and often actual, invented) quotes, passive voice syntax and similar authorially-odious stylistic prophylactics, in a seamlessly-contrived info-transformation from plucked-from-imagination fiction to on-the-record ‘fact’. The old epistemological ‘hall of mirrors’ multiple-layer shuffle, one every single journalist knows like the back of their hand, and uses every day as a matter of utterly unquestioned ‘honest n’ ‘umble jobbing scriv-craft, guv’ – as if cunningly manipulating the infinitely fertile nuances of English to do exactly whatever you want it to do is just like knocking together a workin’ Joe’s nice bit ‘o carpentry. Guv. To whit:
You Won’t Believe Why He REALLY Resigned
By Jack ‘All About Me’ Robertson-Woodstein-Gruber
….blah blah made up sh*t click-bait filler blah blah…Ultimately, Whether or Not – As Significantly Still Has Yet To Be Either Explicitly Confirmed Or Denied – It Might Eventually Prove to Be The Case, the Undeniable Fact Is that the Very Fact of Such Speculation – As It Has Indeed Been Said By Sources Close to the Issue that Some Senior Sources Very Close to the Issue Are Already Openly Speculating, albeit Off The Record – clearly demanded that the harsh reality of Public Perception in this age of Endless Media Speculation made Conroy’s departure a fact of On-the-Record political life that had to be accepted. Perhaps the existence of the photograph with the Great Dane is fact. Perhaps it will eventually prove to have been a complete fiction.
But the only facts that count in modern politics, at least, are clear and on the record: Stephen Conroy had to go…
*I’m ready for my close-up, Mr Walkley…*
The problem for journalism is…we can all play this game, now. We all write our own newspapers every day. We don’t think what journalism does is White Man’s Word Magic anymore. We all know – by daily doing – that all it takes to make banal old words ‘say’ whatever we damned want…is a bit of a talent for authorial sleight-of-hand, and a platform. Hell, Chris Mitchell has just given us an updated, localised blueprint for the BS Biz (it boasts a long proud history of such literature, since word-propagandists have enormous egos and like cat thieves and dogs that sh*t in naughty places, they can’t resist returning to their own best work to preen over it). Mitchell’s is a blow-by-blow manual that might as well be titled ‘How To Put Pure Invention Into The Public Domain As Fact in Broad Daylight & Live To Boast In a Book About It’.
On the Record/Off the Record…Jesus. You can start whole entire repulsive unnecessary wars that cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands if not millions of ruined lives with this On The Record/Off The Record (et al, et al) non-fiction writerly street hustle ‘convention’ horse-crap. Topple governments, instal them, topple them again…make a fortune, lose it all, make another. Knife a historian, destroy an enemy, elevate a mate, impress your damned mistress. Edifying, ain’t it folks? The noble Vocation of Truth-Telling To Power. Out of the J Writer via the Gospels, multiple popes, machiavels and sundry used-car poets down literate history…down, down, all the way down the dishonest line to Goebbels and his mass media spawns, spewing dishonest words out into the brilliantly fertile Marshallian sunlit filth-plains of 24-7 Murdochetry, until here we all are on the f**king incontinent internet and all the damned kids are doin’ it these days.
S’in our DNA now. No-one even knows just how toxic this sh*t is anymore.
Lies, lies, lies….writers who care about their tools need to call them what they are, anyway. Born with a blessed gift for word-play, were you? Want to play games with espistemology? Then write explicit fiction. Take the Shakespeare route. The Shriver route. The Demidenko route, FFS. No pay-the-rent safety net, no on/off record nonsense, no handy short-cut ‘conventions’. Write whatever you want, need, must. The pay is sh*t but the fact is…won’t be much longer and no-one’s going to be paying much for non-fiction, either. Not when you can pick it up for free – and to suit – from the mountainous slag-piles of it lying around.
Old, quiet, receding threads…plenty of real estate, nobody minds. Chrs MR, your media stuff is always, always on it. This stuff is…well, it’s the very marrow in the very bones of any viable, sentient, literate future. IMHO. Ta&rgds J.