Informed consent

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 35: Surviving
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Michael Gawenda

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Michael Gawenda’s biography and other articles by this writer

‘Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of non-fiction writing learns - when the article or book appears - his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and the "public's right to know"; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.'

- Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer (1990)

THIRTY years ago I wrote a series of articles for The Age about a group of teenagers who were in their final year of school. They came from different schools around Melbourne, private schools and public schools. There were perhaps twenty teenagers in the group and we met regularly through that year, mostly at my home. I met with some of them on their own, because the plan was for two or three major pieces on the group and six or seven individual profiles. The series would run in December and early January, before the VCE results came out. I planned to gather the group together the following year to see what had happened to their dreams and aspirations.

Those were different times for journalism. I was given time to develop this idea and time to spend with the students and then I was given the space, lots of space, in the paper for the series. I was in the thrall of the so-called new journalism. I had been blown away by the New Journalism anthology, edited by Tom Wolfe, and by Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, the bible of new-journalism disciples. By the time I came up with the idea for the school-leaver series, I had spent weeks living in a Housing Commission flat in Richmond where there had been a large number of suicides - almost daily someone jumped from one of the top floors of the estate's tower blocks. The piece I wrote afterwards was perhaps six thousand words long and ran in the Saturday edition.

I had also lived on the streets of Melbourne for several weeks with the home--less and again the resulting piece ran in the large-circulation Saturday paper.

I believed back then - and perhaps I still do - that good journalism, good writing, needs no justification. This conviction, that the story was what mattered, enabled me to accept that one of the people I had met during my time with the homeless felt betrayed after the piece was published. She was in her early twenties, perhaps younger, and she had a three-year-old daughter. We met at one of the shelters. She liked me and trusted me. I was living homeless, but I wasn't homeless. Somehow she knew this, or at least she knew that I could be relied on not to do her harm. One night a young man asked her to go with him to a party. She really wanted to go to the party. She arranged to leave her daughter with one of the shelter residents, a man she knew nothing about, whom she had met just hours before. I could not let her do this. I insisted that she decline the party invitation. The young man was furious. He accused me of being jealous, a failed old creep with no future who wanted to deny her a night out.

She didn't go to the party. We talked late into the night and then we spent the next couple of days together - me, the young woman and her daughter - and then I disappeared, back onto the streets. I had a story to write and had to move on.

When the story was published I went back to the shelter to find her. When I did, she was furious and would not speak to me. The last time I saw her, through the window of the billiards room, she was sitting with her daughter on her knee. I had not named her in the story, nor had I written about the party incident. She did not feel comforted by this. With good reason, she felt betrayed.

Three months later I began on the school-leaver series. One of the teenagers I profiled was an eighteen-year-old from an inner-city high school. She was smart and articulate, and feisty, and impatient to get on with life. I knew she would make a page-one story. She was a second-generation Greek-Australian and she felt alienated from what she considered to be the conservatism and sexism of the local Greek community. She wanted to move in a wider world and she wanted to proclaim this ambition, dream her dreams, in the pages of The Age. I told her that there would be repercussions once the story was published. I told her that she couldn't possibly imagine what it would be like for her to be on the front page of the paper, telling her story to hundreds of thousands of strangers. But she wanted her story told and, truth be told, I wanted to write it.

The series was a great success. The story duly appeared on page one with a lovely photograph of her standing on the St Kilda Beach pier, gorgeous and vivacious and hopeful, staring out across the water, dreaming her dreams. Two days later the local Greek newspaper published selective quotes from my story in a piece that soon had community leaders saying she had shamed her parents and the community. The Greek paper implied she was immoral and had betrayed her parents' values.

As far as I know, the rift with the local Greek community was never repaired. I think her mother eventually forgave her. She and I stayed in touch over the years. She said she did not regret the article, despite the fallout. She had thrown off an anchor that would have weighed her down forever. The public humiliation and denigration was for a good cause, she said.

Her cause was not my cause. My cause was a good story.

THE CAUSE OF a good story is in a sense the subject of Janet Malcolm's book The Journalist and the Murderer (Knopf, 1990). Published first as a two-part series in the New Yorker, in 1989, it examines the relationship between the writer Joe McGinniss and the convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald, who had consistently proclaimed his innocence in the murder of his wife and two children. McGinniss started out to write a book from MacDonald's perspective. He was offered unfettered access to MacDonald's legal team, his family, his friends and MacDonald himself. The two became close. In the course of his research McGinniss became convinced that MacDonald was a sociopath who had in all probability killed his wife and children. He did not tell MacDonald, but continued to see him and they stayed apparent friends. When the book was published MacDonald sued McGinniss for breach of contract and fraud. The case resulted in a hung jury and McGinniss settled the case by paying MacDonald more than $300,000 in damages. Leading journalists testified for McGinniss, arguing for the right of journalists, in the public interest - which meant, I believe, in the interests of good journalism - to mislead their subjects.

Janet Malcolm argued that McGinniss had committed a fraud and a betrayal, and from that she argued that all journalism involves betrayal. The interests of the subjects of journalism and the interests of the journalist are never aligned. The better the journalist, the more experienced and skilful, the more this non-alignment is hidden from their ‘victims'.

Every experienced journalist knows that, to some extent, this is true. On some level I betrayed that young homeless woman and betrayed the teenager whose life was changed by her story appearing on page one. There are many people I betrayed in this way, in the sense that they did not really understand what they were letting themselves in for. What they thought they were doing was not what I was doing. The stories I wrote about them were not their stories, but mine. What they thought was important was not necessarily what I thought was important. This helps explains why Paul Keating has never forgiven Don Watson for his wonderful book Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A Portrait of Paul Keating, PM (Random House, 2002). Watson had ‘stolen' Keating's story and made it his own. Keating felt like Watson had broken an implicit contract between them. And the more widely Watson's book was acclaimed, the more Keating felt that contract had been broken.

IN 2009, IN the aftermath of Victoria's Black Saturday fires, I was the director of the Centre for Advanced Journalism at Melbourne University. Black Saturday was Australia's worst peacetime disaster. One hundred and seventy-three people died in the fires and hundreds were injured. Thousands of houses were burnt; towns like Marysville were all but wiped out. Suddenly all the issues I had wrestled with - as a journalist, both when I was a reporter and, later, when I was an editor - came to the fore: the implicit contract between reporters and their subjects, what constitutes consent between reporter and subject, the balance between the public interest and the right to privacy of people in distress, the effects on ordinary people of being suddenly subjected to intense media coverage. All these issues are magnified in natural disasters.

We decided to embark on a major research project. The first part looked at how the media covered the fires, the ethical guidelines journalists used in approaching and writing victims' stories, and the effects on journalists of reporting on a disaster that claimed so many lives and left so many people homeless and grief-stricken. The second part examined the effects on survivors of becoming the subject of reporting, how they viewed the reporting, and whether the stories about them were accurate and reflected their experience. We interviewed twenty-eight journalists, editors, executive producers, photographers and film crews, and twenty-seven survivors. This was not a scientific survey. It was qualitative research - almost a form of journalism - that used the skills and experience we had developed as journalists. Denis Muller, the chief researcher, had been a colleague of mine at The Age, and is now the leading authority in Australia on journalist ethics. He is both an academic and a working journalist, a rare combination in Australia.

The interviews with the media people were conducted in 2009, six months after the fires. We waited until early 2011 to interview the survivors. The Centre for Advanced Journalism has now published the reports of the research in Black Saturday in the Media Spotlight. I think it's a landmark book. For the first time, to my knowledge, journalists and survivors of a major natural disaster - both sides of that implicit contract between journalists and their subjects - talked about their experiences, about how they interacted, how they judged the coverage of ‘their' disaster, how the journalists were marked by the experience of reporting the disaster, and how the survivors experienced and reacted to that reporting.

Most of the journalists and editors we interviewed were thoughtful and glad of the opportunity to talk about their work. Many had been deeply affected by covering the fires and their aftermath. Many of them became emotional - some cried - when they recalled those days and nights. Few had received any counselling. Indeed, while counselling services were made available, most felt that the culture of their newsroom was such that seeking support would be seen as weakness. They might not be sent to cover a similar story again. None had received any training in dealing with grief-stricken and traumatised people. For many, reporting Black Saturday was the first time they had been exposed to death and suffering on such a scale. All said they had to rely on their personal ethical values - their humanity - in deciding how to report. There simply were no shared, explicit ethical guidelines.