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Comment by accountyaccount | Hacker News Reader

I'm not going to spoil the podcast I guess, but towards the end I was definitely really not enjoying how deep it was going. I think it pushed at least an episode beyond the journalistic ethics I'm comfortable with.

I don't think any of us can speak for the subject of the podcast (and I think it still matters despite how it ended up), but when I put myself in his shoes I would not feel good about how far the podcast went.

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This is the bargain you make when you talk to a journalist, you get your side of the story on the record, but you usually have no control over where the journalist takes it. You're not comfortable with that, don't speak to journalists. Barring outright misrepresentations by the journalist about their intentions, I don't see anything wrong with this.

Some of them didn't speak to Reed and still ended up in the story.

Maybe I'm misremembering: Who didn't speak to him and ended up in the story?

The subject's mother, as I recall.

Was there anything damaging revealed about her? I don't remember anything.

Right, but I didn't think it was morally right for the journalist to carry it as far as it went beyond the on the record elements.

I'm not talking about whether or not it was allowable, I'm talking about the moral implications.

If I openly talked about my sexual partners with a journalist (in this case, he didn't) — it would be kind of messed up to track them all down, find out my specific kinks, and then publish that without asking me.

You could technically do it, but I don't think I could feel good about publishing it.

Okay, but if journalists had no ethics whatsoever beyond a legal obligation, than no one would want to talk to them and we would not get to listen to people's stories. It's not so much about what you could get away with as a journalist, but about trust between you and your subject. I think that by and large Reed did a good job of giving the story a fair telling. There were a few things though, like what was said in the article, that went to far in my opinion.

Reed's spending 5-10 minutes in that one episode defending his actions was not very convincing to me - where he said he had to guess what the subject would think.

>he had to guess what the subject would think

Yeah, that's just not ethical as far as I'm concerned. When you're guessing about consent you should assume you don't have it.

It's tough to discuss without spoilers, but there's no way he could get consent, right? And there's no family to seek consent from (save his mother who didn't seem lucid enough to consent) but he did have consent from the other people he interviewed.

I don't even know.. I felt uneasy listening at times due to this exact question, but I don't think it was unethical at all.

I guess it's Journalistically Ethical, but as a person it just didn't see morally right to me. I think it went from telling a compelling story to airing something the subject didn't explicitly disclose, and in some regards intentionally masked.

I think on balance it was worth it for the insight it provided into the soft underbelly of this country. Made me think more and longer than pretty much anything I've seen, read or listened to in the past 20 years.

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