S-Town Reflection: a Question of Ethics
Ethics is a funny word. Dictionary.com defines it as “a system of moral principles.” Well then, what does this search engine consider to be the definition of the term “moral”? Apparently, “of, relating to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong.”
But who’s to say what is right and what is wrong? Who decides what we can or can’t, should or shouldn’t say? Ask Brian Reed, narrator of the S-Town podcast, what he considers to be ethical journalism and I guarantee you’ll get a vastly different opinion than the slew of critics who can’t seem to get enough of this small town recounting.
In S-Town, the listeners are privy to a wide variety of information – information that the subject of the podcast cannot control. Why? Because …
*SPOILER ALERT. YOU HAVE OFFICIALLY BEEN ALERTED OF A MAJOR S-TOWN SPOILER.*
… he’s dead. He can’t whisper to his friends to shut up or tell you to turn off the podcast from beyond the grave. In dying, John B. McLemore has given up all rights to his privacy. But is that ethical?
Did he have a plan when he invited Reed into his troubled life? Did he know he was going to immerse an outsider in his world and then leave him there to expose all aspects of it? None of us can know for sure. But what we can do is call into question the ethics of ripping open a dead man’s diary, Xeroxing it, and putting it in the mailbox of every American in the country.
We see more of McLemore after his death than we do in the two chapters of the podcast during which he is still breathing. Once gone, is Reed the one who should hold all of his cards? In today’s media, we see breach of privacy after breach of privacy, making McLemore’s situation just another nonchalant exposé.
Then why does it feel so different? We usually only hear about the famous ones – the people who have willingly put every aspect of themselves out into the limelight. But when McLemore is shamelessly spoken about as if he were a fictional character in a novel, it feels dirty. It feels dirty because we are taught to think of celebrities differently than we do ourselves or the everyday man.
Ever heard the phrase “they’re people, just like you and me”? We say it all the time about famous pop stars and movie stars. We say it because we need to be reminded that these icons are humans with thin skin and breakable bones. And we need to be reminded because we let ourselves put these people up on pedestals and idolize them, allowing us to forget that they have the same right to privacy that McLemore does.
Why do we strip celebrities of the empathy we give to McLemore? Or better yet, does the fact that we heard McLemore’s story told on a podcast make him as distant as these celebrities that we watch like hawks from our private residences? Does the fact McLemore invited Reed to tell his story instantly remove his right to privacy? Or did he even do that?
