Ruth Marcus is the least likely of all possible Sarah Palin defenders. Yet even the Washington Post columnist, who attacks Gov. Palin on a regular basis, writes that Joe McGinness' unhealthy obsession with Gov. Palin has gone too far:
McGinniss’s choice of venue is outrageously, unnecessarily intrusive. There is -- there used to be and should be, anyway -- a difference between reporting and stalking, serious journalists and papparazzi. Not that I’d want to make my living chasing celebrities, but the papparazzi, at least, have an excuse: they have to stick their cameras in people’s faces to do their jobs. McGinniss and Marcus don’t. People, politicians included, deserve a zone of privacy, literal as well as metaphysical.Joe, if you're bashing Sarah Palin, and you've lost Ruth Marcus, you've lost your argument. Go back to your real home in Massachusetts, finish your smear job of a book and leave this family alone.
Slate’s Jack Shafer says he has “no problems, ethically or morally, with him getting as close to his subject as possible” and puts McGinniss’s behavior within a “long journalistic tradition of wearing sources and subjects down until they surrender.” His examples include “knocking on the door of a grieving family to ask them, "How do you feel?” and “frequenting a subject’s favorite bar, place of worship, and subway stop until he cracks.”
I’ve had to do that knocking -- not easy -- but I was taught not to besiege grieving families. If that’s changed, too bad on us, but there are remedies against such harassment. Going to a public place in pursuit of a source is different from essentially spying on the source in her private domain.
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In a statement, McGinniss’s publisher promised that he “will be highly respectful of his subject’s privacy as he investigates her public activities. Really? So respectful of her privacy that he invaded it? Plow through all the papers, interview all the sources you want. But seizing the opportunity to live next door is creepy.
- JP
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