When Hitsville wrote originally about the fact that filmmaker Errol Morris had paid some of the subjects of his new documentary, “Standard Operating Procedure,” one commenter here took issue with it. He made this remark:

While some documentaries are surely “journalistic,” I would love to meet the first asshole who decided that all documentaries be judged according to the standards of journalism.

Well, I am that asshole. Now that the issue has made it to the New York Times, It’s worth explaining exactly why it’s wrong.

1) You can say that documentary making is a form of journalism, or you can say that they both have the same role, which by definition is to convey some species of factual information. Inherent in that process are certain ethical requirements. The stream of furors over fabricators in the press and in the sleazy world of memoir publishing, and, now, with the interest in this angle, in the documentary world, is strong evidence that people feel the promulgators of such stuff should be honest. Any species of documentary has its parallel in the print world. There is the advocacy piece; there are re-enactments of key scenes, based on the testimony of participants; and of course high-level investigative work. These are all valid, and viewers, like readers, are smart and can easily apprehend the difference between “Woodstock” and “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Hoop Dreams,” “The Sorrow and the Pity” and “Crumb,” and they can surmise on the objectivity of the makers with some reliability as well. But that ability breaks down when a documentary that appears to be operating at a very high level of objectivity was actually put together with some rules broken behind the scenes.

2) When you pay someone to be in a documentary, or a source for a piece of journalism, you create an incentive for them to embellish their story. They are working for you now; maybe they should give value for money. The scene being described might take on a little more drama; the tears for the camera may come a little bit faster. A filmmaker of great integrity might work hard to minimize those corruptions of the truth, perhaps. Others won’t.

3) It creates a market, in the economic sense of the word, for the truth. Many subjects of documentaries are of interest to one person—the documentary makers. Others have a much wider appeal and can make money writing their own book. A wide swath in the middle, however, will be delighted to find a potential new income stream available to them. That’s good for them, bad for the dissemination of information to the rest of us.

4) It’s possible that Morris that opened up a portentous can of worms: Here he has created a market for information of great national import. It’s hard enough for reporters to get information of governmental malfeasance; now American service people in the Middle East know there is a money to be made talking about bad behavior over there. Why should they talk to a legitimate reporter when they might be able to score a documentarian with a checkbook?

Those are the real-world reasons why you shouldn’t pay for interviews. The joke, of course, is that I didn’t even have to make those arguments. Morris knew it was wrong. If paying for interviews is OK, why did Morris just not tell people? When asked about this at a screening of the film, according to the original blog post about it, you can see he didn’t answer the question right away. (”Morris eventually acknowledged that he did, in fact, pay his interview subjects, jokingly explaining that he did so because ‘I have a lot of money and want to share it.’)

Here’s what Morris said when he was asked about it by a GQ interviewer:

“I don’t know if it’s a great idea for me to talk about it. I’ve always felt that if someone specifically asked me, I wouldn’t lie about it, because I think that would be incredibly stupid.”

This issue has a tangential similarity to the sophistry in the debate about payola in the music industry. It’s not illegal to take money from a record company to play a song on the air; it’s illegal to do that and not tell listeners. The argument isn’t about taking the money: it’s that both parties want to keep it secret. No one’s telling Morris he can’t pay for interviews; and if by his lights it’s ok to do so, why not just tell people at the beginning of the film—”Some of the participants were paid to be interviewed”?

Instead, as I wrote earlier, Morris has a penchant for gnomic utterances that are less than they seem. Here he displays another tick, turning an ethical issue that reflects badly on himself (paying people for interviews in his movies without revealing the fact) into an ethical pat on the back for himself. (”Yes I robbed the bank, but I made a personal vow to myself that I would answer truthfully if asked about it.”)

Morris also retreats into half-truths and semantic games. In a statement made to Hollywood Elsewhere, Morris said he paid Fred Leuchter, the subject of his film Dr. Death, to appear in certain scenes, but not to be interviewed. This is a specious distinction. He also muddied the issue by talking about travel expenses, when travel expenses are a side issue.

And when the NYT wrote about it today, the reporters quote him indirectly saying he had paid interviewers “for their time,” another bit of euphemism. (“We weren’t paying the congressman for his vote, Your Honor; we were paying him for his time.”)

And it’s probable, too, that Morris has been complicit in allowing the impression to get out that he didn’t pay for interviewers. In an extremely favorable NYT feature story on the new film several weeks ago was this passage:

That Mr. Morris was able to wrangle Ms. England—as well as Janis Karpinski, Abu Ghraib’s former commanding officer, and Tim Dugan, a contract interrogator, among others—came about through a careful and persistent cultivation of their subjects and their lawyers.

It’s possible that the reporter wrote that on his own authority and that the issue never came up in his interview with Morris. Possible, but doubtful.

The final argument Morris puts forth is that he couldn’t have gotten the interviews otherwise. This, too, is intellectually incoherent. (”There’s nothing wrong with doing this, but in any case I had to.”) It is the documentary-maker’s job to find the interviews, just as it is the reporter’s job to get the story. Sometimes, it can’t be got.

In my discussion with the commenter, I said that I hadn’t contended that paying for the interviews affected the content or integrity of the film, though of course it did. Journalism has all sorts of moral issues when it comes to seducing sources, as Janet Malcolm impoliticly noted many years ago. But there are some ground rules, and it helps both the craft and, more importantly, the understanding of audiences to adhere to them. In a world transfixed by reality TV that’s made up, memoirs that aren’t, and a fair and balanced cable channel that isn’t, I’d like to point out that the problem with the world today does not extend to the overstrict observance of such niceties. Where you stand matters.

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Hitsville: “Does Errol Morris pay people to be in his films?”

The original And the Winner Is… blog item.

The original Hollywood Elsewhere item.

NYT: “Film on Abu Ghraib puts focus on paid interviews”

NYT: “Of crime and perception at Abu Ghraib.”