Selling Someone Out: On Privacy and Ethics in Journalism

Journalism is difficult but technically uncomplicated. A reporter is charged with finding people or data that know more than them, and forming a cohesive articulation of what is happening. That’s it — there are many ways to do this, some better than others, but the actual process is mostly uncomplicated. Success is more about possessing a certain brazenness. Reporters need to have the gall. 

Like most writers — and hopefully all journalists — I want to write about the truth. Any truth, whether it’s the mundane observations of a world outside the window I’m working by, or some higher moral Truth about the human condition. I actually prefer the former. That truth is more grounded, less grandiose and more real. Technically, something cannot be “more true” — it either is, or it isn’t. But one truth can be more relevant than another, and I think that’s sort of the same thing. 

“Writers are always selling someone out,” Joan Didion writes to close out the preface of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. 

Didion has reached the sort of literary fame that shrugs off the work of journalism. She’s a writer, an essayist, a memoirist, a novelist, and one of the co-writers of A Star is Born before most would call her a reporter — “journalist” seems to have slipped off her CV in the public conscience. 

In the same preface to her first essay collection, Didion writes:

“My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does.” 

▓

Media is changing. Of course it is: newsrooms are being slashed, local news is evaporating, and every ambitious person under the age of 30 who still wants to work at a proper newspaper is doing audience, probably for the Los Angeles Times, based on my Twitter feed. The conversations about how to fix the monetary problems in journalism are much louder, but there’s another quieter, albeit sometimes swifter to action, discussion about how to handle changing ethics. 

Mugshot roundups are a staple at most papers. On a slow news day, they’re a dependable click generator, as people scroll through, hoping to see someone less fortunate than them that they recognize. The accused are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty but the people arrested are only arrested, subjecting them to the court of public opinion before much has happened with their case. In January 2020, The Houston Chronicle became one of the latest and biggest newspapers to announce they wouldn’t use mugshot galleries anymore. 

Cleveland.com is going even further. The newsroom has debated the “right to be forgotten” in its own pages for years. In 2018, they started a sort of appeal process for those who had minor crimes expunged from their records to also have their names scrubbed from the website, albeit with some stipulations. 

It’s not just that an online record is more permanent than a paper clipping. (In fact, as local news dwindles, that’s not even true anymore. A coworker who used to work at The Vindicator in Youngstown, Ohio told me that when the paper shut down, so did the website — and the stories he hadn’t saved page proofs of disappeared.) News articles are simply more accessible than when there were only paper copies: Your name is searchable, and with it, everything your name has been attached to. 

The ethics and practices of student newspapers at Harvard and Northwestern have been discussed on Twitter by the most lauded in those students’ prospective field. For the latter, student privacy was the main topic in question.

The staff of The Daily Northwestern, in particular, faced vitriol-laced commentary on social media when they apologized for their coverage of a protest against former Attorney General Jeff Sessions in November. Perhaps they went too far in their apology — they apologized for using a student directory to text sources, for naming protesters, etc. — but the conversation was an important one. 

The apology is signed by eight editors. There are more than 500 comments on the website, debating whether they sold out the student body or themselves. 

I’m a journalist working in local news, and I’m not much older than the staff at The Daily Northwestern. Mostly, I write about schools. 

There are no hardened (if false) cowboys, no LSD-laced toddlers, nor folk singers’ temporary students in my source list — just normal people, college students, parents either trying to help their kids or unable or unwilling to do the work, school employees of the highest and lowest grade, and various activists with their own agendas, and I say “agenda” in the least judgmental or dismissive sense of the word. In local journalism and small-town politics, even the most prominent in the community seem a stretch and a half away from “public figure” in the way Didion’s subjects often are. I struggle to treat them as such. I think a lot of them might be smart or worldly enough to be aware that my presence could run “counter to their best interests,” in a way Didion claims her subjects aren’t. 

I am not soft on the people who have a professional obligation to speak to me. Superintendents, union reps, organizers, elected board members, state legislators are all fair game. But the mother who cried as she showed me a video of her young autistic son in a seclusion room? And then, also, the young son who might not have a firm grasp on what his mother has shared with me? The DACA student who calmly shared their fears during a protest after the 2016 election? Even if their stories could aid in changing things on the macro level, how can I try to persuade them to take the plunge on a personal level? The risks are far greater than they would have been at a student or small daily newspaper when Didion was sitting in a kitchen in the Haight-Ashbury district. Most of the stories at smaller publications will never garner more than a few hundred clicks, if that. But the potential for virality and infamy has encroached on subjects never really threatened before. 

Concessions have already been made to grant reporting subjects another inch of privacy. Shuffling through old clips from my own paper, I can find quote attributions that included a home address. Not just for elected officials, “public figures,” whatever that means for local news, or institutional spokespeople. The addresses were for the laypeople, the civilians, as journalists like to condescendingly distinguish themselves from. In 2020, such a practice would immediately be attacked as doxxing. There’s a shift in the sort of privacy people expect, or at least the type of control they have over their own privacy.

░

I don’t want to sell people out. I arrived late to Didion, but she was the first writer I read when I decided a few months ago to take writing outside of my day job more seriously. Her refrain hasn’t haunted me so much as it’s pulsed through my body, from my pounding heart to my shaking fingertips. Writers are always selling someone out. I have always striven to be empathetic and fair to the people who share their stories with me, but now I’m hyperconscious of what I’m doing. I’ve texted sources to remind them that going “off the record” requires my agreement to avoid selling someone out in the future, or to avoid someone feeling like I’ve sold them out. At least I have something to point to, an “I told you so” if it ever happens. I over-explain myself to the kids and teenagers I interview. 

If the quotes are for color and the kids are especially young, I might describe a kid by their age and sense of style, rather than name them. At least partially, this decision is to avoid becoming too friendly with them. I’m a “safe adult,” and I look like most of their teachers — young, white, female. I don’t want to encourage them to be too trusting of adults they don’t know, even if they look safe. No one has corrected or challenged me for doing this yet. 

There are surely editors, old school or otherwise, who might be horrified by this approach to reporting. The facts are the facts they might say, especially when it comes to stories about arrests or petty crimes. If people will read it because it’s of interest to them, it’s news. We need the clicks, those pennies from the ad revenue. 

Journalists are not unobtrusive observers they sometimes argue themselves to be — “I don’t make the news, I just report it.” They’re not responsible for what decisions get made, of course, but even at dull board meetings, where a journalist sits with the audience (if there is one) and doesn’t speak, the board members are usually more self conscious, perhaps more guarded, even about uncontroversial things. They sit a little straighter, speak a little more tightly. Mostly, their decisions are uninteresting, though not inconsequential. I think a lot about the different portrayals of Judith decapitating Holofernes. In one by Caravagio, she is physically distant, with a shockingly placid furrowed brow. Even with her hands doing the violence, they are far from the blood. In another work by Artemisia Gentilesci, she is much more actively involved, if still calm. The blood hasn’t hit her skin yet, but it’s spurting that way.

Of course, Holofernes got what was coming to him. As a caveat, I must make clear that this metaphor is imperfect for a lot of situations. I don’t want to sell anyone out.

Featured Image: Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec, Miss Loië Fuller (1894)