I still don't understand what actor Sean Penn did wrong by publishing his exclusive conversation last October with Mexican drug lord Joaquin (El Chapo) Guzman in Rolling Stone magazine, right after Mr. Guzman was arrested last week.
Perhaps if we examine the sausages of outrage that have been flung at Mr. Penn by Florida Senator Marco Rubio ("grotesque"), by the great minds of journalism and by common readers alike – and I say that as Mr. Penn gets ready to be interviewed by Charlie Rose – we can understand what all the fuss is about. But remember, it's sausage: You may not want to know.
1) Mr. Penn is not a journalist, and therefore has no business writing important stories.
Mr. Penn, a famous thespian, activist and once and perhaps future sex partner of Madonna, had the gall to do what no professional journalist has managed: find, meet and interview, at considerable physical risk to himself, the reclusive, murderous and twice-escaped Mr. Guzman, who by his own admission in the story is the world's biggest trafficker of heroin, marijuana, methamphetamine and cocaine.
He may have been researching a possible future role, but that's beside the point. Many daring journalists would have leaped at that story, but none of them are famous movie stars, with famous movie star access. This upsets the journalists. The story isn't brilliant or classic journalism, but is a fascinating document nonetheless, and that upsets the journalists even more.
Mr. Penn has done this sort of thing before, with Raul Castro (President of Cuba) and Hugo Chavez (former president of Venezuela), and in both dastardly Iraq and evil Iran, among other places. He likes to take on the sacred skunks of America.
He has been pilloried for these acts of journalism, but keeps committing them, according to his own words in Rolling Stone, because he is "drawn to explore what may be inconsistent with the portrayals our government and media brand upon their declared enemies."
Vanity Fair, which loves piling on for publicity, calls this "rationalizing" – this from the magazine that put Caitlyn Jenner in a bathing suit on its cover, also big news.
Patrick Radden Keefe maintains in an interesting article in The New Yorker that there isn't much new in Mr. Penn's piece. But Mr. Keefe is an expert on El Chapo.
Among the revelations in Mr. Penn's piece are details about Mr. Guzman's heirs, his technical incompetence, how he ran his empire from prison, that he sent engineers to Germany to learn how to build the tunnel he used to escape from jail last summer and the fact that state border guards in Mexico seem to do El Chapo's bidding at a nod. That was all news to this reporter.
Even Marty Baron, the muckraking editor of The Washington Post (one of the subjects of the movie Spotlight), has jumped into the fray, tweeting: "good moment to remember what happens to real journalists who cover Mexican drug traffickers."
Dozens of "real" journalists have died doing so. But in what way does that take away from Mr. Penn risking his safety to uncover the mind and circumstances of their killer a little more, to the best of his (non-real journalistic) ability? A little bit of information is always better than no information. If Mr. Penn's story led to the arrest of their killer – and while that wasn't his intention, it seems to be the case – that's one less killer of journalists at large.
2) Mr. Penn allowed Mr. Guzman "quote approval," although Mr. Guzman found nothing to change.
This one has the keepers of journalistic purity running around with their hair on fire. The editor of The New York Times – which has devoted at least 17 stories in the past four days to Mr. Penn's morally depraved journalism – says the paper would have stepped away from the story, had anyone at the Times managed to get the story by promising quote approval.
If so, he is unique in my experience of big-time editors, every single one of whom would have sold his mother to get Mr. Penn's story, and then would have tried to deny quote approval afterward.
Andrew Seaman, the chairman of the ethics committee of the Society of Professional Journalists – a body many journalists do not know exists, and feel no need to consult – went even further: "Allowing any source control over a story's content is inexcusable."
That's malarkey. Even the best newspapers (The New York Times is one) read quotes back to sources to make sure they are accurate, and use unnamed sources, thus opening the possibility that the sources will manipulate a story. No newspaper or publication likes to do these things, but they do them based on the value of the result.
The result in Mr. Penn's case was a widely read account of the sociopathically banal mind of a drug lord whose organization is responsible, by one estimate, for the death of 30,000 Mexicans in recent years alone. Surely, insight into that kind of criminal callousness justifies breaking an unofficial journalistic rule.
3) Mr. Penn is a bad writer.
This is at least partly true. Mr. Penn seems to be channelling the mutant hybrid ghost of David Foster Wallace and Hunter S. Thompson, with neither man's talent, precision or command of grammar. But if dismal writing was grounds for dissing journalism, 60 per cent of what is published and broadcast would never see the light of day.
Personally, I would not have mentioned my flatulence or my member in the course of writing about one of the world's most criminal drug cartels, as Mr. Penn does, even to humanize the narrator, which is obviously what he's trying to do. But those missteps are sideshows in a story that quotes a drug kingpin admitting to his perfidy in his own words for the first time – and which raises legitimate questions, among others, about El Chapo's customers.
"Are we, the American public, not indeed complicit in what we demonize? We are the consumers," Mr. Penn writes. That's a question Hunter Thompson asked as well.
The pertinent issue, of course, is why Mr. Penn's unruly story got the panjandrums of journalism all puffy and pouty. Reporters like to pretend that they have special expertise, that there is a holiness to the job and an official scale of importance as to what gets published.
That's not true. One of the really great things about journalism – and this was true even before the Internet – is that anyone alert enough to be a witness to the world can try to be one. There are actually no official rules at all in journalism (beyond libel, the disputed right of a reporter to protect sources and personal standards), nor can there be – because a free press needs to be free, of official standards as much as of censorship.
The fact that Sean Penn is publishing secret conversations with drug lords in Rolling Stone while The New York Times and The Washington Post slap his wrists for doing so is proof that, so far, no single power is telling the media what to say.
But that doesn't stop citizens in every age from trying to make rules or others from trying to break them. Too bad we spend so much time these days being obedient to the former.