Ron Rosenbaum wants magazine journalists to stop fawning and start reporting again:
Powerful figures who now think they can avoid thoroughgoing scrutiny by journalists just by withholding their participation might become a little concerned that magazines might then decide to hire more energetic and investigative-minded reporters (the sociopaths of doom) to look more deeply into their record than those who lazily settle for unexamined explanations and equivocations in person. And a write-around would of course inform the reader that the subject is afraid of facing a nonsycophantic reporter, may indeed have something to hide, questions he or she doesn't want raised.
[…]
And you editors out there. Don't be so attached to having a big shiny famous head on your cover. Don't be afraid to use stock photos: A well-chosen black-and-white stock photo can give a cover subject a something-to-hide, caught-in-the-act look that can be far more dramatic and revealing (and often truthful) than the big shiny exclusive photo head.
Let's put it this way: The best intellectual journalism ever conducted on leftist politics in the 1930's was Murray Kempton's Part of Our Time, in which he relied — so far as I know — on no first-hand sources or personal interviews to profile figures as surreptitious as Whittaker Chambers, Alger Hiss, Lee Pressman, Paul Robeson and Elizabeth Bentley. (Writing about Communists in real time, without the benefit of declassified archives, was like translating the Dead Sea Scrolls into Esperanto.)
In fact, I'd underwrite Ron's good sense about the write-around with following thought experiment: Compare any work of investigative journalism about the Soviet Union that used one-on-one interviews with Joseph Stalin with those that did not. Which gave the more accurate assessments of life in the world's first workers' state?
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