Horizon

Shades of Phil Ochs' "Outside of a Small Circle of Friends" and also the Janet Malcolm "Freud Archives" dispute.

Janet Malcolm is a really depressing read, though. Her The Journalist and the Murderer makes a painfully convincing case that all journalism is betrayal because the journalist will always, necessarily, portray others' statements in a way they didn't expect. Of course the answer to what she says -- one it strangely took me a long time to think of -- is that journalism is supposed to look past the sources' manipulations and self-deceptions. The source isn't the customer; the source isn't always right.

Anyway, it's funny to see two sets of relatively similar disputes involving people in the psychology world interviewing each other. You wonder, is there something about people with psychology training that leads to conflicting claims about who said what?

Journalism is supposed to look past the sources' manipulations and self-deceptions. The source isn't the customer; the source isn't always right.

True, but surely you'd agree there's a difference in kind between representing people and events in an unflattering light, and plain making things up - which is what Malcolm and Slater have both been accused of doing.

When I wrote the "Journalism is supposed to..." sentence you've just quoted, I was thinking about Malcolm's criticisms of Joe McGinniss, the guy who expressed warm support for a murder defendant and his defense team, and then without warning wrote a book saying he had come to believe the defendant was guilty after all.

So there's a continuum here maybe: making up stuff about people is plain wrong; saying truthful but unflattering things about people is just part of the territory; the difficult place where betrayal becomes an issue is the space in between where journalists display a friendly attitude to win people's trust and then place the disclosures they've extracted in an unflattering light.

I think journalism based on the written public record is morally cleaner than journalism based on interviewing but there's a place for them both. Dunno. This is a tough one.