In November 1970 Esquire published one of its most memorable covers ever. Illustrating “The Confessions of Lt. Calley,” the first of three articles about the man who led his platoon in the murder of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians in My Lai, it consisted of a photograph of Calley, in full uniform and grinning broadly, surrounded by four adorable Asian children.
Perhaps Calley was smiling because Esquire had paid $20,000 (the equivalent of more than $100,000 today) for his exclusive cooperation with the veteran journalist John Sack, who received $10,000 for writing the articles. And this wasn’t the only instance of Esquire’s paying the subject of a story; in 1963 the magazine had promised Muhammad Ali (then Cassius Clay) $150 ($1,000 in today’s dollars) to cooperate with a young journalist named Tom Wolfe for “The Marvelous Mouth,” which it published in its October issue.
That these two clear instances of checkbook journalism were published during Esquire’s golden era, when it was edited by the legendary Harold Hayes, makes one wonder: Can journalistic greatness coexist with a practice associated with sleazy celebrity magazines and tabloid television?
In the wake of the James Frey, Stephen Glass, and Jayson Blair scandals, contemporary journalists and educators have become obsessed with the profession’s ethics. And there is no principle about which they are more adamant than the one prohibiting any kind of monetary exchange between a writer and the subject of his story. In today’s ethical climate, a journalist who questions any aspect of this principle risks forfeiting his journalistic integrity.
The arguments against checkbook journalism are obvious. The promise of cash for information creates an incentive to tell a journalist what he wants to hear, regardless of whether it is the truth. There is always the possibility that subjects will lie and that journalists will make mistakes, but the less likely it is that they have a financial relationship, the more likely it is that something approximating the truth will find its way into the next day’s paper.
But does the prohibition hold in every instance? It would obviously be a bad idea for a daily reporter to go around handing twenty-dollar bills out to everyone he interviews. But what about the magazine or book writer who spends months, perhaps years, trailing his subjects? Do the reporter’s ethical constraints apply when he is interviewing a character dozens of times, depriving him or her of every shred of privacy, or when his project depends completely on his subject’s continuous and willing participation? Does such a journalist—especially one working for highly remunerative magazines or whose books become best sellers and perhaps even movies—really owe his subjects nothing? Is the difference between rules guiding the daily reporter and the magazine writer one of degree or of kind?
In fact, one might argue that some kind of exchange is inherent in every immersion-based reporting project, that there are no such things as selfless subjects or reporters. One character cooperates in order to publicize his message; another wants to be famous and possibly even rich; some desire revenge. And among the reasons the professional journalist writes, of course, is the pay.
The fear of being branded with a scarlet C keeps all but the most intrepid journalists from ever thinking about the gray territory that lies between outright money for information checkbook journalism and that in which the writer is self-conscious about his debt to his subjects. The examples of those few who have are suggestive.
In the epilogue to There Are No Children Here, Alex Kotlowitz explains that the family he writes about agreed to cooperate with him without any promise of remuneration. After Kotlowitz had finished the book, however, he decided to use some of its proceeds to set up an educational trust fund for the two central characters, a final act of compassion for two boys with whom he formed all sorts of connections while reporting their story. “I know there are some people who will say that I became too involved with the family, that I broke my pact as a journalist to remain detached and objective,” he writes.
Jon Krakauer, the author of best sellers like Into Thin Air and Into the Wild, objects in principle to paying subjects for information. However, he adds that there are some occasions when they “deserve to be compensated for their contributions.” For instance, while reporting Under the Banner of Heaven, Krakauer paid twenty thousand dollars for the rights to a woman’s memoir, even though she had already provided him all the valuable information it contained. He recognized that he had benefited from the exchange and that there might be a way to help her without undermining the integrity of his project. “She was dirt poor and struggling to overcome some serious problems, and I wanted to compensate her for helping me,” he explains.
The question of what, whether, or when a long-form journalist owes a source is never going to be straightforward. It is a discussion that takes place at the extremes of journalism, where the extraordinary duration and depth of reporting put the writer-subject relationship in a different light. And for every Alex Kotlowitz and Jon Krakauer, there is a Joe McGinnis, whose contractual relationship with Jeffrey MacDonald (the author agreed to share the proceeds of his book, Fatal Vision, and went so far as to join the defense team during the trial) blew up in his face after McGinnis had begun to think MacDonald might be guilty of murder after all.
The point is not that journalists should routinely compensate their sources; in the vast majority of cases, they shouldn’t. Rather, it is that we should be suspicious of the knee-jerk way in which journalists invoke the no money for information rule. Isn’t it possible that it is simultaneously true and a way of banishing awkward questions of money and exchange from our moral calculations? In the murky intimacy that comes with immersion reporting, reporters sometimes literally owe their subjects everything. Perhaps this is why they try to avoid the topic entirely.