I ran onto this in the Lexington Herald-Leader and felt the need to share.
The short story is that there was a bitterly contested interim election for a seat in the Kentucky state house, and the two combatants are going back at it next cycle. The Democrat, a woman named Robin Webb, won by the slimest of margins.
So her opponent, and a doctor friend, came by to lobby. With a secret video camera.
For those of y'all too busy to jump to the link, here's the story's lead:
When state Sen. Robin Webb met in her Capitol Annex office last week with the Republican candidate who wants to replace her and a representative of the Kentucky Medical Association, she was secretly videotaped, she said Thursday.
Webb, D-Grayson, said she resented the secret recording during a meeting with GOP rival Dr. Jack Ditty, and Dr. Henry Goodman, an Ashland neurologist.
Ditty is a Greenup County dermatologist who lost a special Senate election to Webb last year by 282 votes and has filed to run against her this year. Neither has an opponent in the May 18 party primary elections.
Goodman said Thursday he taped the meeting without Ditty's knowledge "to make sure Sen. Webb's comments about one of her bills were consistent with what she had been saying."
(And let me note that the byline is Jack Brammer's. We tend to quote the publication here, and to neglect the writer.)
Now...I'm not from Kentucky, but the longer I live here the more I come to grips with the particularly gritty nature of politics here. The same front page covers a vote buying trial, for example.
So the guy's a creep, and a sneak, and maybe what he did is even legal. Probably, from what I can remember about one-party consent. And that's the part which is more interesting to me, because the sad truth at least here is that the party affiliations could have been turned around.
I've been a working journalist/critic/writer since some point in the mid-1970s, when portable cassette recorders were shiny new toys. I can remember putting the deck out on a table to interview people and having one subject bite pretty hard at me that I hadn't asked permission first. (I was about to, but I was a kid.) Even so, permission was granted.
As the years have gone on, it's become less and less the case that one asked permission to record. Now it's simply taken for granted, particularly because most of what I do are phone interviews these days. Of course it's being taped.
No, I might add, videotaped, though just this morning my brother-in-law sent me a link to software which would allow me to record Skype interviews. (The cassette was a good thing, and I had a transcription machine which went with it, but they no longer make good cassette recorders, and the transcription machine has gotten old and funky, and is about to become landfill. I'm looking for a replacement, but not assiduously.)
Point being...years ago the producer Steve Fisk said something which has stuck with me. We are surrounded by samplers, he said, whether they're cassettes or minidisc recorders or cellphones. Zapruder's film of the Kennedy assassination, that's a kind of sampler. It was Fisk's belief that soundwaves should be fair game in the creation of art, that he should as an artist-producer be able to sample whatever sounds he wanted and collage with them. (And I've doubtless summarized his position badly, from memory.)
As the technology to record becomes increasingly portable, we're going to have to grapple with the ethics of its use. And, I suppose, if I were a politician, I'd want my interlocutors to check their luggage at the door.
Typed quickly over the first cup of coffee.