I’m largely very admiring of David Remnick’s tenure as EIC at the New Yorker, but his remarks about Gay Talese’s regrettable article (and book), The Voyeur’s Motel, are wrong-minded and tone-deaf. I’m speaking specifically about the quote he gave Erik Wemple of the Washington Post after the piece got even dicier as new information came to light:

“The central fact of the piece, that Gerald Foos was, in the late Sixties and Seventies, a voyeur, spying on the guests in his motel, is not in doubt in the article or in the Post’s article. The fact that he could sometimes prove an unreliable and inaccurate narrator is also something that Gay Talese makes clear to the reader, repeatedly, and is part of the way Foos is characterized throughout the article. This is not an account of, say, national security. This was, from the start, a profile of a very peculiar character, to say the least, and Gay Talese flagged those qualities honestly and repeatedly.”

Two things:

• This comment explicitly states that journalism that’s not about something as important as national security needn’t adhere to the same rules of scrutiny. That shouldn’t be the case. Even if lives aren’t in the balance, nonfiction articles on any topic, from baseball to ballet, should be treated with the same standards in regards to editorial oversight and fact-checking.

• The article Remnick refers to is NOT a puff piece. A woman is purported to have been brutally murdered, which Gerald Foos says he didn’t alert the police to at the time it occurred and Talese didn’t report when he learned of its possibility later on. Maybe it was all a twisted fantasy or perhaps it was truly a horrible crime, but trying to diminish this story into one in which no one could have possibly have been hurt is a convenient rationalization.

The last thing anyone wants to do is beat up on an octogenarian who’s done lots of interesting work, but if someone remains in the game at an advanced age, they should expect their work and ethics to be scrutinized as much anyone’s else’s. I would think Talese wholly accepts this reality.

This imbroglio reminds me of something Remnick said a couple years back, when paraphrasing Condé Nast Creative Director Anna Wintour. He told Politico that “I’ve learned a lot by talking with her about how she does what she does…when you’re dealing with writers or other editors, God knows if you’re running something larger like a country, Hamlet-like indecision may be interesting, but it’s highly ineffective.”

This line references Wintour’s 2013 comments in which she said: “I realized possibly that what people working for [an editor] hate most is indecision. Even if I’m completely unsure, I will pretend to know exactly what I’m talking about and will make a decision.”

This statement wasn’t sensible when Wintour made it nor when Remnick parroted it. No one in leadership should waver endlessly, but there is a difference between right and wrong, often a huge one, and having a spine of steel won’t change that, won’t make everything equally okay regardless of the direction taken. In the case of Talese’s piece, Remnick should have taken more time to decide. What he may be forgetting is that the really decisive Hamlet did far more damage than the dithering version.•