Disclosure Policy, Ethics and the Artistic Roll Call

One of the boys from SOTCAA made a post on a forum recently that got me thinking about personal ethics and the ethics of reviewing in general.

Feted and much missed comic Bill Hicks once said :

"If you make a commercial, you're off the artistic roll call forever... you're another corporate fuckin' shill, another whore at the capitalist gang-bang
and if you do a commercial there's a price on your head; everything you say is suspect, and every word that you say is now like a turd falling
into my drink" - Rant in E-minor.

Harsh words?  perhaps.

By and large I'm your typical high mach who has a rather flexible attitude to morality.  In fact, I remember once being marked down at grad school for writing an ethics essay in which I argued that moral facts aren't detectable so they might as well not exist. However, I'm also what you might call an "egomaniac... with a small e", and in this respect I don't think I'm all that different from any other critic out there.  I think that my opinions are interesting and worth reading, otherwise I wouldn't have this site.  Part of being an egomaniac is that my conception of self is quite strong and the way I think of myself is that I am someone who has principles.  I wouldn't necessarily call myself "moral", particularly as that always puts me in mind of people who are "spiritual", but there are things that I don't do and one of those things is temper what I say.  Indeed, some wits have pointed out the difference between the name of my site and the spiky tone of a lot of my writing.

Emergency Lalla Ward Ten's post about changing moral standards and the creeping acceptance of advertising and PR cash in the artistic process also put me in mind of this vodcast by Jason Calacanis.  It's an hour long but it's worth a watch as Calacanis interviews the CEO of a company that effectively commissions blog posts on behalf of sponsors.  What's fascinating about the interview is that the journalistic ethics of Calacanis and those of the marketer are clearly quite different.  Calacanis states that you need ethically to state immediately whether you received any payment for something you write so that the reader can make up his own mind as to whether or not you let that influence you.  Meanwhile, the marketer thinks that as long as an article is well written, it doesn't matter what a person's motivations were for writing it.

I think that there are grounds here for reasonable people to differ, I don't think either person is obviously wrong, particularly as there are different kinds of recommendations that appear to have their own special moral codes.

Firstly, some people accept recommendations because of the person doing the recommending.  Oprah or Richard and Judy are good examples of this kind of thing and their huge power in the publishing industry is proof of this.  None of these people review books, they just rely on their relationship with viewers to sell a particular book.  "Trust me... I'm Oprah" she might as well say.  Clearly, if it turned out that Oprah or Richard and Judy had been getting kick backs then they would rightly be savaged for their dishonesty.

Secondly, there are the recommendations that are accepted on the basis of the content of a review.  This is why some people consider it important that a book review be impartial and transparent; a reader of the review must be able to follow the line of reasoning behind your evaluation so that they can opt out of your opinion at any moment.  At first glance, motivation is less of an issue with this kind of review because you're being transparent about what you think and why you think it.  For example, when I reviewed The Harlequin, I made it clear that I didn't like the book and as such wanted to explore my dislike rather than fairly weigh up the pros and cons... I'd done the weighing before I wrote the review.

The problem is that, even in a transparent review that relies entirely upon the reader being able to follow a line of reasoning, it would be easy to gloss over a factor that might have influenced your opinion, even if it was at a subconscious level.

This is why I have a problem with blog disclosure policies.  I don't think that it is ever that cut and dry.

For example, I've written in the past that I receive advance review copies directly from Orbit books.  In fact, reviews such as The Harlequin and Shadowplay were written about purely because I had the books to hand.  Had I not been given free ARCs of these books there is no way I would have given them any coverage as there's no way I would have spent my own money to pay for them.  In fact, most review sites are kept afloat through the use of ARCs of books and DVDs.  Most review sites do not pay their writers so in effect the contract underlying most reviews is that a review is written in return for a free review copy.  What are the ethics of this situation?

Another example is particular to this site.  My brother works in the film distribution business and, from time to time, he'll give me a screener of a film that he has bought the rights to and more often than not I'll turn said DVD into a review on here, the most recent of which was my piece on Lagerfeld Confidential.  What are the ethics of this situation?

What is interesting about these pieces I have linked to is that they are all, broadly speaking, negative reviews.  Nobody could accuse me, on the basis of these reviews, of selling my opinions for a free DVD or book.  However, I'm not completely clean, am I?  I mean, you can't obviously say that the above reviews should be discounted because I got ARCs but at the same time, did the fact that I got the works for free influence me?  maybe I was harsher precisely because I felt guilty for the freebies and came down extra hard in order to be sure I wasn't a shill.The truth is that I don't even know. 

Our psychological processes are not completely clear even to us and as such it is impossible to be completely transparent and open about how you reached an opinion about a book.  However, I think it is important that we, as writers, be as honest as possible and so, in future, I will be disclosing at the start of my pieces how I got my hands on a particular piece of media; whether it was free and from whom I got it.