[Interpretationandmethods] What do we owe our participants?

[Timothy Pachirat]

Apropos our conversation....

April 26, 2008
Film on Abu Ghraib Puts Focus on Paid Interviews
By MICHAEL CIEPLY and BEN SISARIO
NYTIMES


Errol Morris, the Oscar-winning filmmaker whose latest documentary,
"Standard Operating Procedure," examines the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse
scandal, is being pressed about a procedure of his own: paying
interview subjects.

Mr. Morris said this week that some of the lower-ranking soldiers who
were convicted of tormenting inmates at Abu Ghraib in Iraq were paid
for their time, in which they recount events at the prison in detail
and describe a wayward environment that led to the excesses.

"I paid the 'bad apples' because they asked to be paid, and they would
not have been interviewed otherwise," he said in a statement. In a
brief interview after the screening of the film at the Tribeca Film
Festival in Midtown Manhattan on Thursday night, Mr. Morris would not
say which of the soldiers he paid, or how much.

Word of the payments drew conflicting reactions among those in the
world of film documentaries, where show business values have been
known to collide with the more austere standards of good journalism.

American newspapers, magazines and television news divisions do not
generally pay subjects for their interviews; their caution is rooted
in a belief that the credibility of interviewees diminishes when money
changes hands and that these people will provide the answers they
think are desired rather than the truth.

Some, though, said that documentary subjects have routinely been paid
for many years — and that failure on the part of filmmakers to share
the wealth might actually constitute abuse of people whose troubles
will become the stuff of a profit-making enterprise.

"It's not all that uncommon, it's just something most people don't
talk about," said Diane Weyermann, executive vice president of
Participant Productions, which helped finance "Standard Operating
Procedure," and was a producer of "An Inconvenient Truth" and "Jimmy
Carter Man From Plains."

"Sometimes, you're paying subjects who have nothing," Ms. Weyermann
said. "You're making a film about them, and you don't want to exploit
them."

But in the case of "Standard Operating Procedure," the payments have
reverberations in the realm of print, where cash compensation for an
interview violates a deep taboo. A book linked to the film, by Mr.
Morris and Philip Gourevitch, is scheduled for publication on May 15
by Penguin Press, and was adapted recently in The New Yorker.

Mr. Gourevitch said the payments did not trouble him.

"Truly, this seems to me like a nonissue," said Mr. Gourevitch, who is
the editor of The Paris Review and has been a staff writer for The New
Yorker. He said he had based his own work largely on interviews Mr.
Morris compiled for the movie and was aware that some interviewees had
consulting agreements with Mr. Morris, in keeping with common film
industry practice, but he did not know which.

The material, Mr. Gourevitch said, was nonetheless solid. "The way it
was generated in an industry not my own does not in any way call into
question" its validity, he said.

The New Yorker does not allow its writers to pay for interviews, said
David Remnick, the magazine's editor. "When stuff is done as
first-order material of The New Yorker, which is to say, by our people
or by freelancers who get an assignment," Mr. Remnick said, "it is
never done. And if it was done, I wouldn't publish it, period."

Mr. Remnick said that he had been unaware that Mr. Morris had paid
interview subjects for their time, and noted that the material came to
the magazine at one degree of remove.

He added that Norman Mailer's book "The Executioner's Song" involved
payments to sources, and that he would have excerpted it, if given the
chance. "The book is a masterpiece," he said. "So what do you do? If I
could, I would hope to try to find a way both to publish and also to
be straight with the reader."

In the interview on Thursday night Mr. Morris expressed some
ambivalence about whether these payments should have been disclosed in
the film, which opened in New York on Friday, accompanied by
promotional materials that show an image of a digital camera and the
tag line, "Weapon of Mass Distortion."

"I perhaps should have," Mr. Morris said about disclosing the
payments. "I didn't feel the necessity of doing it. I didn't disclose
at the end of 'A Brief History of Time' that Stephen Hawking was paid
a considerable amount of money to appear in that film, and for the
rights to his book."

In his statement earlier this week defending his practices, Mr. Morris
said, "Without these extensive interviews, no one would ever know
their stories." The statement came after the Web site
andthewinneris.blog.com noted Mr. Morris's admission at an early
screening of the film that he had paid for some of the interviews.

(Mr. Morris regularly discusses the complexities of the documentary
craft in a blog on the New York Times Web site at
morris.blogs.nytimes.com.)

"Ghosts of Abu Ghraib," a documentary by Rory Kennedy that was shown
on HBO last year, included a statement at its conclusion disclosing
that some participants had been paid honorariums. An HBO spokeswoman
said she did not know which subjects were paid and declined to specify
the amounts. She added that the network did, "from time to time, pay
people in the way of an honorarium." Ms. Kennedy did not respond to
queries about the payments.

Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism,
a nonprofit organization that reviews performance by the news media,
takes the conventional view on so-called checkbook journalism. "If you
pay people for a story, you create an incentive for them to make it
more dramatic than the facts might bear out," he said.

Mr. Morris, 60, won an Oscar in 2004 for his work on "The Fog of War:
Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara." A leading light
among politically oriented documentarians, he is known as a meticulous
interviewer who works his way past a subject's defenses with the help
of a special device, the Interrotron, that allows interviewees to look
directly at Mr. Morris's image, not at the camera, when they are being
recorded.

In "Standard Operating Procedure" he makes the point that the
notorious pictures that injected Abu Ghraib into the news — including
those of Pvt. Lynndie R. England holding an Iraqi prisoner on a leash
and Specialist Sabrina Harman posing over a body of a prisoner
tortured to death — did not tell the whole story.

"At Abu Ghraib you had people dropped in a horrendous river," Mr.
Morris was quoted as saying in an article that appeared on Sunday in
The Times. "The stage was set. The public seemed to think it would
have been so easy for these soldiers to just walk out. They were in
the Army!"

To date, his most controversial practice has been his occasional use
of re-enactments to examine moments that have not been captured by the
camera. Mr. Morris used that technique extensively in "Standard
Operating Procedure." That movie cost something less than $5 million
to produce, according to Tom Bernard, a co-president of Sony Pictures
Classics, which is distributing the film.

"I can't say this is any type of scandal or anything abnormal," Mr.
Bernard said on Thursday. He noted that documentary makers faced an
ever more difficult fight for access to prime subjects, as the number
of filmmakers expanded, and interviewees became more aware of the
profit potential in nonfiction films.

Indeed, a documentary as hallowed as "Grey Gardens" — the 1975
character study of two eccentric Bouvier women in their decrepit house
in East Hampton, N.Y. — involved payments, according to one of the
filmmakers, Susan Froemke. In an interview for the 2002 book
"Documentary Filmmakers Speak" by Liz Stubbs, she mentioned payments
as commonplace.

In 1989 Mr. Morris settled a suit by Randall Adams, a death row inmate
who was the subject of his "Thin Blue Line," and whom he helped to
free. Mr. Adams received rights to any books or commercial movies
about his life.

A spokesman for Michael Moore, known for highly polemical
documentaries like "Fahrenheit 9/11" and "Sicko," said he did not know
Mr. Moore's policy regarding payment to subjects and was unable to
reach him. Robert Greenwald, a contemporary documentary maker whose
work includes "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price" and "Outfoxed:
Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism," said he was not troubled by Mr.
Morris's payments. But Mr. Greenwald said he had not made such
payments on his major projects for fear that critics might later claim
the exchange of cash had tainted them.

"We assumed we would be under attack by Fox, Wal-Mart and others," Mr.
Greenwald said. "We didn't want to give them an opening."

David L. Paletz, professor and director of the film, video and digital
program at Duke University and a co-chairman of the selection
committee for the highly respected Full Frame documentary festival in
Durham, N.C., called the practice of paying interview subjects "very
dicey."

"My own position," he added, "is that it shouldn't be done."


Michael Cieply reported from
Los Angeles. Ben Sisario reported from New York.

On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 12:44 PM, <psshea at csbs.utah.edu> wrote:
> All,
>
> Wednesday I attended a talk on Participatory Action Research, an arena in which this issue of "giving back" appears to have been analyzed quite a bit.  Interestingly, this researcher just negotiated a move out of the social sciences to a department in another college that values the variety of "research products" to which she contributes - some scholarly but others that are desired by her "co-researchers," e.g., a documentary on undocumented high school students who benefit from a current Utah State law (always under threat of being withdrawn) that grants them in-state tuition.
>
> Peri Schwartz-Shea
>
>
>
>
> Quoting Ed Schatz <ed.schatz at utoronto.ca>:
>
>
> >
> >
> >
> > Dvora,
> >
> > Interesting interview that touches on a variety of issues. I would take up
> > two things.
> >
> >
> >
> > First, on epistemology: isn't a researcher who operates at close range with
> > people being studied and who simultaneously acknowledges (not just
> > perfunctorily, but really acknowledges) her/his impact on these people also
> > much more likely to have his/her truth claims be influenced by them? That
> > is, if you are embedded in human relationships with the people you study,
> > doesn't it become difficult NOT to imbibe, at least to some degree, their
> > perspectives?
> >
> >
> >
> > Second, "giving back" is obviously a crucial and largely ignored aspect of
> > research. But my own sense (others probably disagree) is that we need to
> > remember that this is not the normal giving back that one would find in
> > ordinary human relationships. The researcher, in addition to being embedded
> > in human relationships with people being studied and subject to the norms
> > that govern those interactions, is also embedded in a research community
> > which has different norms and imperatives. So, if I choose, for example, to
> > pay someone for her participation in a research project, this needs to be
> > balanced against norms in the scholarly community (e.g., is paying for
> > information appropriate? Is the quality of the information provided affected
> > by payment?) and the norms in other, overlapping communities (e.g., if I pay
> > for someone to participate, what does this do to scholars-perhaps local
> > scholars, if we are talking about developing countries-who don't have access
> > to funds to pay for participation? Would "driving up the price" for
> > participation be justified?). In the end, therefore, I think that the
> > "giving back" might look pretty watered down.
> >
> >
> >
> > Monetary payments, I think, are rare (and for good reason). Giving back can
> > thus take on a variety of forms, but again, I sense that it would be
> > difficult to imagine giving back in ways that would equal what our
> > interlocutors have given us in the first place.
> >
> >
> >
> > Just a few hurried thought. Now back to grading...
> >
> > Ed
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >  _____
> >
> > From: interpretationandmethods-bounces at malagigi.cddc.vt.edu
> > [mailto:interpretationandmethods-bounces at malagigi.cddc.vt.edu] On Behalf Of
> > Dvora Yanow
> > Sent: April 19, 2008 11:54 AM
> > To: interpretationandmethods at malagigi.cddc.vt.edu
> > Subject: [Interpretationandmethods] What do we owe our participants?
> >
> >
> >
> > Colleagues, and especially those doing ethnographic, participant-observer,
> > interview or other interactive research or who are interested in research
> > regulation such as that conducted by 'institutional review boards' in the
> > US:
> >
> > Here's a link to a series of 4 exchanges between a journalist and a social
> > scientist that begin exploring the question, What do we owe our [to put it
> > crudely; not their terms] data sources?
> >
> > http://www.slate.com/id/2183149/entry/2183160/
> >
> > Venkatesh's comments about the presence of the researcher, for me, stop
> > short:  he frames his response entirely in terms of having an impact on
> > others, not in terms of positionality and 'truth claims' -- tho he may be
> > responding within the frame of Kotlowitz's questions and comments.
> >
> > Ed Schatz, Tim Pachirat, Dorian Warren, others -- any comments?
> >
> > Dvora Yanow
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > !DSPAM:4810b48e17123612316194!
> >
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Peregrine Schwartz-Shea
> Associate Professor
>
> University of Utah
> Political Science Department
> 260 South Central Campus Drive Rm 252
> Salt Lake City, UT  84112-9152
>
> (801) 581-6300 phone mail
> psshea at poli-sci.utah.edu
>
>
>
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