Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.
The journalist Janet Malcolm wrote that back in 1989, and it still makes me shudder with a mix of indignant denial and shamed recognition whenever I read it. It was the beginning of an article in The New Yorker, later published as a book, The Journalist and the Murderer, in which she examined a true story of a journalist's relationship with his subject.
It was not so much the details of the case, more Malcolm's general accusations that have cast a long shadow, and though they have had good effects - writers are more likely to look at what they are doing with a critical eye - she also hasn't offered much hope for anyone who aspires to write ethical non-fiction.
Must such writers always end up, as Malcolm puts it, ''a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse''? She thinks so: ''There is nothing to be done.''
Matthew Ricketson doesn't think so. The Canberra journalism academic has written a book, Telling True Stories, a useful guide for students of non-fiction and practitioners that also looks at the moral dilemmas the genre raises.
He devotes a chapter to Malcolm's legacy, which he sees as a knotty problem for people writing book-length true stories: they will spend far longer on research than the daily journalist, and are likely to become much more deeply involved in the lives of their source, or sources.
Clearly, there must be trust between writer and source. But what kind of trust? How should it be established and maintained? How to navigate the risk such a trust might be betrayed?
Ricketson wants to open up the space that Malcolm appears to have closed down. He looks at particular books; at conversations with leading American non-fiction writers in Robert Boynton's The New New Journalism; and at his own interviews with Australian practitioners.
Not surprisingly, he identifies danger in paying sources for information, becoming friends or getting too close, especially sexually (he is critical of Blanche D'Alpuget for not disclosing her earlier relationship with her husband Bob Hawke until many years after her biography of him was published).
What he advocates is a professional relationship. Again, how to negotiate it? There are no guidelines in journalists' codes of ethics for this kind of long-term connection. But the writers he quotes are well aware of these problems and have formed their own rules - not always the same - for finding out what they need without abandoning their ethical obligations. Much of it is about informed consent.
It's nearly always a compromise, and sometimes you can't win. There's the painful story of Gitta Sereny's Cries Unheard, a 1998 book about Mary Bell, a woman who at the age of 11 had murdered two little boys. Sereny paid Bell a fee, as a recognition of the cost to her, both material and emotional, of co-operating with her for three years; but when the media found out, there was a frenzy of outrage.
Then there are remarkable successes. David Marr, says Ricketson, is a rare example of a practitioner gaining excellent access while retaining almost total independence, when he wrote his biography of Patrick White.
When White read the final manuscript, he famously commented, ''I must be the monster of all time''. I suspect that reading cost White a lot of pain. But he still had enough faith in Marr not to speak out against his book.
