Doug Block video - March 14th

One of the things I found so compelling about this documentary was how ordinarily American the Blocks were. They fit the typical American roles so perfectly that I think a lot of people can relate to their story. If they'd been too different, then no matter how good the story was, it would not relate to other Americans. The mother felt sufocated and a distant father, which was for many baby boomer family. However, I don't feel that it related particularly well to our generation. The story about middle-aged people caring for their aging parents isn't something that we are quite aware of. But I still enjoyed the documentary especially once the diaries were found.

For the purposes of this class, I think the ethical question is whether Doug was right in divluging the private diaries of his mom to the public. Yet I feel his mother made the effort to write, and keep, her diaries. He did not come across a disclaimer that would have offered evidence of her wishes. And I don't know if anyone who keeps a diary keeps it private forever. I feel that diarists secretly want others to eventually read their story. Finally, it was Doug himself who made the documentary not some stranger. It seems as though he had the approval of his sisters and his father who are the people interested in his mother's legacy. But I think it would be an interesting question for Doug to see if he struggle with the decision to make the movie.

Lying - through to the end

This was a very powerful ending. With Slater before her AA meeting companions, she could not convince them that she was a compuslive lier suffering from epilepsy, but rather they thought she was in denial about her alcoholism. The Afterward, too, also ties up Slater's ententions with this book to present a first person view of epilepsy. ""Metaphor," she writes, "is the greatest gift of language, for through we can propel what are otherwise wordless experiences into shapes and sounds.

People love the truth. This is why books from the Da Vinci Code to Presidential biographies are so popular. People always want to know the truth. And Slater accurately points out that the truth is usually vielled by personal opinion and bias--even though the intentions are good. So I think for the purpose of this class, we should take from this book the same lesson we took from Mencken's article that simple acceptance of truth presented as truth cannot be accepted.

Lying chapers 1-7

This has turned out to be a much more complicated book than I expected. Before I even opened the book, I expected this to be a twisted take "like a question mark" as implied on the title page. This was compounded by the revelation that the doctor, Hayward Krieger, does not even exist. What I found most interesting about this is the style of introduction has a tone of honesty. It starts out by referencing Lauren Slater (real) and her book, Welcome to My Country (also real). So even though the reader is thoroughly prepared for lies, the introduction seems immune. We shouldn't have been so gullible.

Next, I expected the book to be an account of epilepsy. I thought it would be first person perspective on the illness the way Benjy's chapter in The Sound and the Fury illustrates mental retardation. And in a sense it does, but I can't separate the truth from the exaggerations. Because if the character actually does have epilepsy all of the occurrences could be true. Was she dropped on her head at age three? If so, did it contribute to her epilepsy. Or is she faking the whole illness as she proposes in chapter 4 and 5 with the annals of Psychiatry and the research paper? The questions just keep piling on like a car crash pile up. Once you mull over one perplexing fact, you're hit with another one to decipher.

This makes the book a lot of fun. I never would have read this on my own. I still think its too strange for me yet I'm glad we're reading it because I'm enjoying the story.

A Million Little Pieces and the Smoking Gun article

So, I've read the comprehensive Smoking Gun article and I really don't know how to react. I think I'm begining to point a finger at the publishers. Talese obviously saw the manuscript when it was being shopped as fiction. Then he must have seen it as a memoir, so why didn't he catch the fabrications? There should have been more of an effort to catch the fictional aspects and seperate them from the facts. I'm also suprised at myself for not picking up on the fabrications while reading the book. The train crash incident is most notable in my mind. How could a lie, that could so easily be exposed, not come to light before the Smoking Gun article. The priest story also seems like a vivid fabrication. How could the priest not require medical attention. There would be records and people would ask questions. It's just a really wierd book.

I'm not sure how to move forward though. The book itself, read in a vacum, is terrific. But I can't give it any merit if much of it is made up. There must be some consequences for his lying. I guess I'm still looking at the situation as if the book and the fallout are in two seperate spheres. I applaude the digging that exposed Frey, but at the same time I admire his book. I can't seem to reconcile the two to come up with a good judgement of the book.

A Million Little Pieces

In our discussion on Wednesday, we talked about the line between fact and fiction that constantly gets blurred. We looked at the difinitions of fiction and non-fiction to realize that the definitions we thought were sound are actually much more murky. I thought of the best-seller The Da Vinci Code and I think one of the reasons that it is so popular is because it is formulated on, possibly, being true. The story is obviously fiction, but issues it raises and link to factual people and events, creates that drama that readers like. Somebody pointed out that many fictional movies promote themselves as "based on true events" to create that aura of honesty.

Frey's book is much different because it comes from the other side--non-fiction with elements of fiction in it. He doesn't get that leeway because he established his book as fact. I believe that Frey's mistake was adminantly saying his book was all true. If he prefeced the book by saying "I couldn't remember all the conversations I had word for word, but the spirit of the dialogue is there," I think we would be more forgiving. It is Frey's own mistake for not being honest in the first place.

The problem now is how much of the fact was stretched, contorted or simply made up. Because Frey said it was all true, instead of smartly preparing the reader by saying it's based on my recollections which can't be verified, we now question all of its facts. It's not possible to seperate what is fact from the fiction when we could have given Frey leeway if he prepared us.

James Frey's A Million Little Pieces

I can understand why this was such a popular book. Frey leads his readers along with a powerful narrative that spares no detail too gruesome. I could barely read the part where he is getting his teeth drilled and yet I willingly read through it despite how I felt. It is an awful experience that he captures and it comes from interesting perspective. Not only is it written in the first person, but it is written in a way that gives readers only the bare essential background. This focuses the readers attention on the action and the imagery. It works well in this instance because the reader feels as though he is in Frey's shoes getting the same experiences that Frey gets. It helps that he does not use quotation marks and that he does not always identify a speaker. But without the background information, Frey puts the reader in the same dazed state of confusion that he is in. This works fabulously well and is the main reason for the books success I think.

But, we know that the book isn't all true. While reading, I'm wondering what parts of it are exaggerate or made up outright. Knowing this, I do take what he writes with suspicion. I'm not simply taken in by the full force of the story that I'm sure I would be if I believed it were true. Like the Mencken article, I would believe this story if I didn't know any better. It doesn't sound exaggerated. In fact, I feel like these details and the exactness expressed in the story could only be achieved by someone who experienced it. Not even a third-person observed could create this story.

But I do want to know what Frey made up for this story. I want to know how people caught on to his exaggerations too. It won't change the fact that this is a compelling story. But I do want to know how far Frey went in making some of this story up and then we can judge whether or not it was ethical and if this book should still be read.

Where do we get our news?

I look at a number of different sources for my news depending on what I want to know. If I'm looking to learn about the Saint Joe's community, I'll read the Hawk. If I want news about hockey, I'll go to thn.com or nhl.com. But for my traditional daily news, I get the nytimes emailed to me. Also, I occasionally steal copies of the Wall Street Journal from the business majors who live in my building. It helps to get two papers with contrasting political angles because I feel it gives me a more comprehensive picture of the world. Though I have access to a lot of news sources, my problem is that I don't have time to read as much as I'd like. It's hard to balance reading for school and reading the news. We don't get a grade for reading the newspaper. But I do try to find time. We have a radio in our bathroom so it helps to have NPR on in the morning.

I think its an interesting issue that Rush Limbagh brought up in his interview. His show, while it does have an overt political message, is essentially entertainment that focuses on turning a profit. This has a big impact on a news sources objectiveness. I don't trust any of the cable news stations because they are only interested in getting the most viewers as possible. The same goes for the national evening news programs. These stations won't take a controversial stance on anything because they don't want to alienate any viewers. For example, these stations won't do a hard, investigative piece on a Repbulican Congressman for fear of alienating Repblican viewers. It's the same with Democratic viewers. They stay moderate only focusing on topical news, but not going beneath the surface. I trust the NYTimes or Wall Street Journal to do this type of investigative work. And if you follow both papers, you get a wholistic view of the political spectrum.

What's the Trouble?

This was a really great story though I was a little frightened at times. But I do understand the problem that this article poses: we all make judgements based on our experiences and conditioned biases. When I took intro psychology, we learned about this phenomenon. People unconsciously make judgements about people based on attractiveness, gender and race. I remember seeing Dateline or 20/20 do a study on this same phenomenon. They sent two women, one with a blond wig and the other with her natural brown hair, to collect donation door-to-door. The blond girl got more donations.

People judge others on first impressions and these first impressions are tough to overcome do matter what the previous behavior is. I know my neighbor has for years refused to convert their home heating to gas, as the rest of the street has, because as a child she was burned by the stove. This relates to the evidence about the businessman who won't make a business deal based on past failures rather than the data that is presented to him.

I think the important lesson from this article is to have other people voice their opinions. In two of the cases, serious errors were saved because another person, who was not as conditioned as the first doctor, made a different diagnoses. For our purposes, to establish if something is true, we could have multiple people check sources. This reduces the chances that conditioned responses will influence our decision making.

Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery

This is certainly a strange story. I would like to know more about the fallout from this book. Was there an investigation of the nunneries in Montreal and Quebec? How did the public respond to this? It is obviously very believable. The characters she develops and the detail with which she describes the nunnery are so believable that they can only be written by an expert. But there are some things which, if I did not already know it was fiction, would have sounded alarms in my head. First, these are just normal people, not members of a cult and yet this seems to be what Monk describes. I don't believe that normal people could carry out the murder of a nun, by jumping on her for that matter, without serious moral qualms. Secondly, it's too derisive towards Catholics. Anything that is so strongly negative has to be questioned.

From an ethical standpoint this is horribly unethical. Mencken's fiction was a harmless experiment that uncovered some flaws in people. But this slander has the potential to do damage to the reputation of Catholics. We know that it was responsible for the burning of one nunnery.

Lastly, I don't think people would be as gullible towards this article as they were towards Mencken's. I think people have a pretty good ability to call out exaggeration and discredit it. Mencken's article slipped under the radar because his fabrication was harmless and presented without such high drama. This story, I think, wouldn't be as easily believed by readers simply because of the great exaggeration that takes place.

A neglected Anniversary by H.L. Mencken

Last semester in my Hemingway and Fitzgerald class, I remember reading a story of Hemingway's where his main character has just returned from the war. When talking to the people from his town the veteran realizes he must embellish his war stories for people to believe him and listen to him. It reminded me of what Mencken talks about when explaining his bathtub story. He believes people are too eager to believe. And once they put their faith in something--he references the Washington Cherry Tree fable--it becomes part of history. This is what Mencken, with his experiment, found very distressing--that people are naturally gulible and antagonistic of changing their beliefs.
I would believe Mencken's article if I took it at face value. If someone told me it was legitimate I would believe the article was true. So I believe Mencken is being too critical of his readers and those who published encycopedia enteries about his article. People expect the article, written in a newspaper, to be real. The encyclopedia writers should have been more thorough, but the average reader can't be expected to question everything printed in newspaper. People rely on truths and yes Mencken fooled us, but it wasn't a fair test.

From a journalistic standpoint, the articles on child pornography don't pose an ethical dilemma. They present the issue of pedophile chat rooms and child pornography as investigative reporting. When conversations were cited in the articles, they use aliases or screen names which already protect people's identification. There is a legal dilemma however. In the case of child pornography, almost every case has to be reviewed independently. The old saying about pornography is, "I know it when I see it." Because no law can be written to cover every case, each picture must be judged on its own. This allows for a lot of judicial discretion. One judge could rule a picture while the other may not. This aspect of pornography makes it a very murky issue for lawmakers. Lastly, I would not want to be the reporter assigned to this story. Must readers probably just dismiss the news story because they don't even want to know about the vulgar nature of the subject. Also, I would let the FBI know that I'm working on this story so agents don't break down my door.

I read the story about Bob Greene before for Dr. Spinner's class, but I'd forgotten what Greene had done wrong. It's funny because when I re-read this story, I thought he was being fired for cooking stories--the same thought I had the first time I read it. Zehme builds up this monumental transgression and my initial thought was, "What could be worse for a reporter than cooking stories." (By "cooking" I mean making up facts, sources and quotes). But no, Greene had an affair with a woman 14 years ago. His credibility as a columnist was weakened, but, as Zehme says, it was not illegal and it does not violate any journalism codes.

The other thing I suspected while reading the column was that Greene kills himself. But he doesn't and in fact the story ends kind of abruptly. Considering how journalists have been abused by things they've done: Rush Limbah took prescription pills and Dan Rather cooked a story about the Bush Administration. Both of these guys have gotten off easily compared to Greene and yet it can be argued that their actions were worse, or at least had a more immediate effect on their jobs.

Dr. Spinner's Ethics Writing Class

Comments on Steve Elwell and Malcolm Gladwell.

Steve's article is so good because it so structured well and involves two story lines. Steve's opening and his description of the pathological disorder are well placed in the story and really keep the reader engaged. Yet the most interesting aspect of Steve's article in dealing with confronting Stephen about his lying. Ironically, Steve retreats from the situation with a lie. Without saying it, Steve reveals how we all lie to people in little ways, to avoid confrontation or awkward situations. So, while our lies may not be as extravagant as Stephen's, normal people are liers too.

Gladwell brings up the frustratingly complicated issue of copyright laws. His main example is a Broadway play that was copied directly from a profile he did for the New Yorker. He also talks about several songs that were copied, modified or adapted from previous works. While the article was written well enough to capture the difficult topic, I really hate this issue. First, it is mind numbingly nit-picky. Gladwell gives an example of Andrew Lloyd Webber used three bits of an earlier composer. But the challenger had to piece together three desperate songs to vaguely get a comparison. Who cares? The article reminded me of the story about the boyscouts (or girlscouts) illegally using the"happy birthday" song. Or the guy on the Maxwell Coffee can who realized they used his picture. Usually these people just see a chance to make money (however pathetic their attempt). Gladwell had a right to accuse Bryony Lavery of stealing because she should have consulted with Gladwell and Dorothy Lewis. But I can't agree or sympathize with the other examples.