“This article has been approved by the subject”

October 1, 2017 6:29 AM

Ginny Dougary writes in the Observer: "After 35 years as a journalist, I experienced two firsts last week. One was that I asked for my byline to be removed from an interview I had written, which was a direct consequence of the other first: the subject of my interview being given, without my prior knowledge, copy control and – in a breathtaking liberty – removing sections of my interview and replacing them with her own, self-promoting, words."
posted by Perodicticus potto (21 comments total)

This is an insane breech of editorial integrity, completely unbelievable that anyone would think this is fine. I feel like every time angry pundits screech about what they call "fake news" it undercuts how important journalistic ethics are and muddies the waters around actual, legitimate fake news like this.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 6:43 AM on October 1, 2017 [6 favorites]

Clare Balding though. Did any Brits opening that not feel taken aback?
posted by biffa at 7:11 AM on October 1, 2017 [4 favorites]

I'll admit that this bit gave me pause:

By the end of that day, I’d been sent a copy of the pages and that, I thought, was that. The next day, I receive an email from the editor, Katy Bravery, apologising but adding: “Clare and her agent have complained that there is way too much about her being gay in the interview, and I have to say I agree.”

Wow! Apart from anything else, the idea that in this year – the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisaton of homosexuality, for which Balding has done some broadcasts – one of the very few leading lesbians in British public life could find an article “too gay” was flabbergasting.

I actually do think that it's inappropriate in 2017 to discuss a queer celebrity as if her sexuality was the most significant thing about her, and I can understand how Balding could have been annoyed if she showed up to promote her children's book and instead got an interview and a piece that were primarily about her being "one of the very few leading lesbians in British public life."
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:15 AM on October 1, 2017 [8 favorites]

Better to be described as leading than falling behind, I guess.
posted by delfin at 7:18 AM on October 1, 2017

This is obviously, for a start, unsisterly and undermining of a fellow woman professional

This is definitely a shocking breach of journalistic and editorial ethics, and terrible behaviour on the part of both the interviewee and the editor involved. But it seems odd to me to frame it as a woman vs. woman issue, when there is no indication that the subject would not have asked for copy control from a man. (I do wonder if an editor would have pulled that on a male journalist, though.)

It is really depressing that anybody would think this is okay, and it makes me wonder what else they're sweeping under the carpet that we don't know about.
posted by rpfields at 7:18 AM on October 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

It's funny, in the ethnographic sciences (especially anthropology), giving 'research subjects' the right to review drafts that cite them and to provide feedback (and/or withdraw their consent to be included in publication) is a central tenet of ethical fieldwork. In many cases (especially when interviewing vulnerable populations that have a long history of being mis-represented in media & scholarship), this is the only way to get consent to an interview in the first place. Many researchers strive to make ethnography more a collaborative project, so that marginalised folks have more of a say in how they're represented.

Anyways, this isn't to defend Saga's actions in this case—the power-dynamics and economic stakes are very, very different here—but rather to note how widely the interviewer-interviewee relationship can vary, from one context to another.
posted by LMGM at 7:22 AM on October 1, 2017 [17 favorites]

I thought it was interesting that David Baddiel’s response was (paraphrasing) that he’d be more sympathetic to the outrage if he hadn’t been misquoted so often by journalists. Because British newspaper journalists getting on their ethical high horse always has a whiff of “I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”

Which is unfair on Ginny Dougary, who far as I know is a good journalist. But the profession as a whole hasn’t exactly proved that it can be trusted over the years.
posted by Bloxworth Snout at 7:43 AM on October 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

Surprisingly high number of comments in here that seem to be bending over backward to find reasons why this isn't so bad and that maybe there were reasons.
posted by dersins at 8:52 AM on October 1, 2017 [6 favorites]

I've always side-eyed Balding since she revealed she apologised to the jockey whose teeth she insulted on air via a text message.
posted by Gin and Broadband at 9:03 AM on October 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

I am flabbergasted that a journalist is flabbergasted that a woman might not want her sexuality be the focus of an interview about her professional life. I can imagine that some super privileged people have never had to think about any of this. But that when she was told about this, and had time to think about it, she would still double down and insist how ridiculous that complaint was...

It's strange, because I can totally understand the journalist point of view, but with the gendered insults and the complete refusal to consider why someone wouldn't want her sexuality be the focus of this interview, I'm thinking that maybe there's some benefit of the doubt for the interviewee here. Is it completely impossible that the interviewee did not know that this is not standard? That an agent arranges the interview, lets her read it, she says she doesn't like a, b, c and would have liked x, y and z, agent says: sure, we'll fix it, and that's that. And then apparently you're suddenly an unsisterly diva who lacks class.

It seems like, if you're a journalist, the person who fucked up here is the Saga editor. Isn't that the person who should have said no and protect those boundaries? I don't get why there's so much hate for the interviewee, and the editor just gets a "maybe she was in a jam".
posted by blub at 9:52 AM on October 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

I am more sympathetic to the interviewee here after having watched a friend's offhand remark about her sexuality after a long, detailed interview about her career get turned into the headline and opener for the article. It's bullshit sexist scandal-mongering, and it's even less acceptable in 2017 than it was in 2001. Now, of course I haven't read the original version, and maybe it wasn't quite that bad, but it really is not good for the artist in question and I don't blame her for being royally pissed.
posted by restless_nomad at 10:00 AM on October 1, 2017

Is it completely impossible that the interviewee did not know that this is not standard?

Close to impossible, yeah. Clare Balding is (or has been) a journalist herself.
posted by Perodicticus potto at 10:01 AM on October 1, 2017

I think the removal of elements of the piece, i.e. the sexuality, is not that unusual although ideally it would have been an editorial choice, not a courtesy choice.

However the insertion of quotes promoting the subject's book's heroine is something as a former editor I would not have okayed, and while I did field similar requests from time to time, my answer was always no. I did interviews with high-profile people but never a magazine cover piece which is a different order of magnitude, so there's that. I did hear a few stories that went towards this area but it was usually more about what the celeb looked like or was wearing.
posted by warriorqueen at 10:10 AM on October 1, 2017 [5 favorites]

This is obviously, for a start, unsisterly and undermining of a fellow woman professional. More importantly, there is an unwritten pact between a publication’s journalist and reader – certainly in reputable publications, which Saga (the magazine in question) is – that what they read is real.

I think Dougary has a valid complaint about the editing of her piece and the presumption that the subject of the interview could insert comments and have them run under Dougary's byline. (Although giving the journalist the option to accept the revisions or not seems to me to mitigate the situation.)

But to claim that when a writer conducts an interview, selects the quotes they find most useful from the conversation, and presents them in a context of their own creation is what's "real"--and some other version of the story is not-- isn't convincing to me.

That may be my own bias--I interview artists, mostly musicians, for a Brooklyn blog, and while I'm paid for the work, I regard it as a hobby. I routinely let the subjects of the interview review my drafts before publication to make sure they don't think I taken things out of context. I also understand that sometimes things said in conversation take on a different implication when their re-produced in print, and I'm happy to remove things if the subject thinks they create the wrong impression. Or even if they just say, "You know, I wish I hadn't said that."

Dougary's opinion of what's ethical is quite reasonable, but I think alternative ideas about the role of interview subjects in determining the printed version of a conversation they participated in are also worthwhile. It's something about which I think reasonable people might differ.
posted by layceepee at 10:11 AM on October 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

Wow! What a disappointing thread of comments.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 10:13 AM on October 1, 2017 [4 favorites]

I expected to be sympathetic to the journalist. Instead, I'm now thinking "what a twit".

She had the chance to write an interesting reaction piece about ethics in journalism and what's appropriate in an interview, or a takedown of her editorial chain, or an examination of how gender/sexuality is portrayed in parallel with describing somebody's work. Instead, she personally attacked her interview subject.

I'm also wondering if she ever plans to do a celebrity interview again.
posted by Metasyntactic at 10:24 AM on October 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

> But to claim that when a writer conducts an interview, selects the quotes they find most useful from the conversation, and presents them in a context of their own creation is what's "real"--and some other version of the story is not-- isn't convincing to me.

That's not the claim. The claim is that the writer's words and version are the writer's and nobody else's, and to present somebody else's words and selection under the writer's name is dishonest and a violation of journalistic ethics.
posted by languagehat at 10:44 AM on October 1, 2017 [4 favorites]

That's not the claim. The claim is that the writer's words and version are the writer's and nobody else's, and to present somebody else's words and selection under the writer's name is dishonest and a violation of journalistic ethics.

That's not how journalism works, though. People's stuff gets edited all the time, and sometimes it gets edited substantially. The problem here is that the subject of the interview had a hand in rewriting it, not that it was rewritten at all.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 10:51 AM on October 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

I confess: I had selfish reasons for posting this. Those of you who have photographic memories or an unhealthy obsession with me will recall that I've been in a similar situation myself. To summarise: I was asked to write (without payment) a piece about a local organisation that maintains a Soviet history archive. I think the editor really wanted a flattering piece that would persuade the organisation to let him use their venue for an event, but no specification was given. So, after many hours in the organisation's archives reading through old copies of their journal, I wrote a piece about how they had repeatedly denied and/or justified the persecution of Soviet composers under the Zhdanov Doctrine. This wasn't a groundbreaking discovery or anything, but I felt it provided some insight into the strategies people use to defend the indefensible.

What happened next was not dissimilar to Ginny Dougary's experience. First the editor asked if I couldn't at least add something about how wonderful the organisation was otherwise. Then he said he wanted to send the piece to the head of the organisation for "fact-checking" before it was published. (I'd included footnotes giving sources for every claim and quotation in the piece, so any necessary fact-checking could have been done independently.) When I objected that this was unethical, I was told it was common practice and I was just being paranoid. (I ended up withdrawing the piece and publishing it online myself.)

But, you know, I'm nobody. And I'm easy to gaslight. So I was delighted when I saw Dougary's piece. Finally, people are talking about this! Proper journalists, even! Now I know I wasn't being crazy, and what happened to me wasn't OK!

That was before I read the comments here. Now all I have to say is: It was clear from the moment I reached Moscow that composers were not blackguarded, banned and banished. It is only hard for us to understand the social criticism of these artists because we have accepted separation between the artist and the people.
posted by Perodicticus potto at 11:02 AM on October 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

Everyone who's okay with this better be committed to Trump demanding rewrites on NYT interview articles. That's not a random reductio ad absurdum; he deletes Tweets, so why wouldn't he want to redo an interview?

This is one of those bedrock journalistic principles that it should take a little more than an unappealing journalist or a sympathetic subject to overthrow.
posted by praemunire at 11:43 AM on October 1, 2017 [5 favorites]

Everyone who's okay with this better be committed to Trump demanding rewrites on NYT interview articles.

And to never objecting to claims of "fake news" again.
posted by Perodicticus potto at 11:58 AM on October 1, 2017