Journalistic ethics and the Kitty Kelley ethos
Mills, Nicolaus
Kitty Kelley doesn't need defenders. The controversy surrounding her Nancy Reagan: An Unauthorized Biography has made her rich (or at least famous) for life. But as the controversy fades...
...But even today, when such concealment would not be tolerated, composite stories represent a terrible danger...
...We get a chance to enjoy the dirt she digs up, and at the same time we get to feel superior...
...What motives or basis the acquaintance might have for making such a statement were never disclosed...
...What is significant in this case is the logic the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit used to uphold the claim by Malcolm and her lawyers that she should not be held for libel...
...Inexact quotations are permissible, the court ruled, as long as they are "rational interpretations of ambiguous remarks" or do not alter "the substantive content of unambiguous remarks...
...The problem is that in the weeks and months to come, when Kelley is no longer headline news, the journalistic climate in which her book flourishes will still be with us, doing more damage than she ever has...
...Suddenly reporters no loner felt confined to telling what they saw or what their subjects said they saw...
...In the case of Deep Throat, identity wasn't finally an issue...
...Times readers were simply expected to trust that the reporter had good reason for using a blind quote...
...When the New York Times decided to reveal the name of the woman who accused William Kennedy Smith of raping her, its story contained the allegation by an unidentified acquaintance that the woman had "a little wild streak...
...q SUMMER • 1991 • 423...
...The felt truth took precedence over a precise rendering of what happened and how a reporter came to witness an event...
...It's great fun going after a writer like her...
...The legitimization I am talking about began in the 1960s when the new journalism brought the techniques of fiction to reporting...
...All of which brings us back to Kitty Kelley...
...But in insisting that Deep Throat, Woodward's source for much of his information, would forever be a secret, the two men paved the way for countless reporters asking readers to take them at their word on stories in which there was no compelling reason for trust journalism...
...But at the same time a line was crossed...
...In the hands of a Tom Wolfe, the journalistic results were often brilliant...
...In short, a quote no longer has to be a quote...
...Of course our love of gossip and the idea of bringing down an ex-president's wife help a book like Kelley's...
...It is the legitimization by mainstream writers of a set of reportorial ethics that Kelley has pushed to the extreme...
...Readers were taken inside the heads of everyone from stock car drivers to Vietnam pilots...
...New Yorker reporter Janet Malcolm is now defending herself against the charge that statements she attributed to a psychiatrist she interviewed (the statements do not appear in the forty hours of taped interviews she conducted) were never really made...
...Trust journalism—and with it the notion that a reporter didn't on occasion have to reveal sources (even to an editor)—took on new legitimacy...
...A decade later during the Watergate scandal, a second major journalistic change took place...
...But as the controversy fades from the headlines, we need to take a second look at the hypocrisy it conceals...
...It didn't matter if Deep Throat was a lone government official or several government officials rolled into one...
...In the 1970s, New York magazine gained notoriety for itself when its editor decided that a story about a prostitute known as "Redpants" would flow better if readers were not told that she was a composite...
...By treating Kelley's journalistic ethics as if they were unique to her, we have made her a scapegoat and diverted attention from a serious question: how did we get to a point where a book so long on innuendo and so short on verifiable fact could command this much attention...
...It was now permissible for a reporter to climb inside a subject's head and, like a novelist, write as if he or she were that person...
...That is not the case, however, in all too many stories in which composite characters are routinely passed off as a single character...
...The biggest change of all in journalistic standards is, however, reflected in a case the Supreme Court is currently deciding whether or not it will hear...
...In their Watergate articles Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward turned out to be so accurate that they helped force a president from office...
...The easy answer—we live in an age of gossip— won't wash...
...Reporters can put words in a source's mouth if they can establish that they had reasonable bases for believing the nonverbatim quotes were what their sources intended to say...
...We don't know if a composite character is an exaggeration rather than an accurate summing up, and we don't know if a reporter is doing a composite 422 • DISSENT Notebook story to get at a larger truth or because the reporter was faced with a dearth of material at deadline time...
...But what has made Kelley's book the source of so much media interest is not just gossip...
Vol. 38 • July 1991 • No. 3
