'You have the right to remain silent'

Toward Interviewing with Honor

It was the sort of dilemma most journalists face at one time or another. I was sitting across a boardroom table from the autocratic managing partner of a large law firm I'd journeyed cross-country to profile. The partner was boasting shamelessly about his management prowess, particularly how well he handled the firm's finances. Unbeknownst to him, I'd been tipped about how a business manager at the firm who worked closely with the partner had recently managed to embezzle more than two million dollars before being caught and prosecuted. The firm had successfully hushed up the scandal, but I had the goods, right down to the embezzler's prison identification number.

Should I raise the subject? I was just a few hours into a scheduled two-day visit. How would he react when he realized that, instead of the toothless puff piece he envisioned, the firm's dirtiest laundry was about to be aired? He could blow his stack and cancel the rest of my interviews on the spot. What excuse would I offer my editors? Still, I couldn't help myself: I interrupted his soliloquy and asked point-blank about the stolen money. "How the hell do you know about that?" he stammered, eyes bulging. It looked as if my visit was over.

Certainly, by conventional journalistic standards, I'd blown it. Everyone knows that you save the tough questions for the end of the reporting cycle, when it's too late for wised-up sources to cut off access and injure your story. That's the smart play. Most journalists have internalized this lesson so well that they don't even think about it anymore. But I have to confess that I've never been comfortable sandbagging subjects, even the ones who richly deserve it. It suggests something fundamentally bent about journalism that I have trouble accepting.

The journalist-subject relationship was famously explored, of course, by Janet Malcolm in her seminal 1989 New Yorker essay, "The Journalist and the Murderer." Malcolm's piece, about the author Joe McGinniss's betrayal of his subject (and accused murderer) Jeffrey MacDonald in the writing of the book Fatal Vision, struck a deep chord within the profession that still resonates. As Malcolm observed: "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."

In the decade after Malcolm's essay appeared, her once controversial theory became received wisdom. Gore Vidal called source betrayal "the iron law" of journalism. Susan Orlean has endorsed Malcolm's thesis as a necessary evil. Only mush-- brained rubes don't understand that the seduction/betrayal model is a necessary component of reporting the story.

I'm afraid I'm that kind of rube. In fact, I think both the profession and subjects have paid a high price for our easy acceptance of Malcolm's moral calculus. I say this in part because of an observation about journalists' values that is happily born of personal experience: Most value candor and favor transparent motives in all dealings of consequence.

If that is true, imagine the selfloathing such people feel when they hang around playing patty-cake with a subject, all the while thinking how they are going to slice the poor bastard up. A few months ago I had dinner with a well-known national magazine writer who had started out with The Washington Post. One of the stories that helped launch his magazine career a decade ago was a cutting profile he did of a young woman for the paper's Sunday magazine. After the story ran, the writer vividly recalled the "atta boys" he got from Ben Bradlee and Kay Graham. But even more vivid is his recollection of the grief of the subject, whom he had allowed to think she was going to be reading a glowing profile. Her reaction still haunts him, as does the lingering sense that he betrayed her trust. Such feelings are a big part of why he has largely abandoned journalism.

Would the writer have been wrong to warn his subject? Many would say yes, having adopted something like the noninterference prime directive that governs the crew of the Enterprise on Star Trek. Maybe so, but I've developed a different sort of directive, a kind of journalistic Miranda warning. While reporting a difficult feature story, I try to alert even sophisticated subjects of some basic realities:

* I don't assume that they have an obligation to talk to me;

* Even if they do talk to me, it's likely there are going to be things in the story they won't like or agree with;

* Even if they don't talk to me, I'll try to fairly portray them and their views in the story;

* I'll check facts with them, but it's my story, not a collaboration. I won't be submitting it for their approval.

The risk of broadcasting such advisories is clear: skittish subjects might bolt. But leaving aside the world of celebrity journalism, whose negotiated terms often render the phrase itself an oxymoron, I find that most subjects agree to proceed knowing these things. And that's because, just like suspects who've been Mirandized by the cops, most people really want to talk, even about the trouble they're in. I try to deal with them aboveboard. If I sense them getting too chummy, I'll lob a tough question across their bow. In general, I believe you can treat interviews as straightforward conversations rather than as a disingenuous seduction game and still get revealing information.